People tend to believe things that look attractive will also be easy to use. Even after interacting with the design, people's stated opinions about how easy it was may be based more on what it looked like, than on what it was actually like to interact with. This aesthetic usability effect was documented by researchers at the Hitachi design center back in the '90s. So what does this mean for you? Well, first, even if you really care mostly about usability, you still need to make your design look good. You don't want people to avoid using it just based on the appearance. Second, you need to avoid falling into the aesthetic usability illusion yourself. The visual appearance strongly influences people's opinions, but opinions that something was easy is not the same thing as it actually being easy. Some teams learn this the hard way after launching a new and improved redesign that they thought looked great, only to see sales decline or support tickets soar because users can no longer find critical information or features that were tucked out of the way because they interfered with the aesthetics. Focusing solely on visual design, without an understanding of the task constraints, is a recipe for failure. What you need to do is, first, define the information and feature needs, then figure out an appealing way to present those. Before you go and implement it, compare that visual treatment back to your original prioritization to ensure that nothing's gotten lost in translation. An attractive appearance is valuable in making people more willing to try using a system and more tolerant of small difficulties. But for interactive systems, appearance is a means to an end, not the end goal itself.