Frontend Design

Make websites feel premium and trustworthy — based on peer-reviewed research, not aesthetic opinions.

Core Principles

The brain uses processing fluency as a shortcut: "easy to process = probably true/safe/good" (Reber & Schwarz 1999). Users form stable judgments within 50ms (Tuch et al. 2012). Two factors drive that judgment:

1. Low visual complexity — fewer competing elements, clear hierarchy
2. High prototypicality — looks like what the user expects for this category of site

This triggers a halo chain (Tractinsky 2000):

Readable + Clean + Predictable → fluent → "beautiful" → perceived usable → perceived trustworthy

Four measurable properties of "premium feel":