SEO Friendly or User Friendly - Which one wins?

If you have 2 sites:

the first site is nicely optimised for seo but is not really designed for the user in mind, evidently it has a high bounce rate

&

the 2nd site which is not as havelity optimised as the first but is more designed towards what the user wants and provides a more defined user experience and has a much healthier bounce rate...

will Google merit the 2nd site which will have a better, healthier bounce rate?

The problem with questions like this is you are confussing issues. A site which is "nicely optimised for seo" is a site which is "designed towards what the user wants" a site with a high bounce rate (as compared to the other sites that appear for the search phrase) is a site with overall poor SEO.

SEO can not be sperated as such. Do what you know to be good SEO. Make your site unique, quality, great content, user foccused and you will find it easier to get quality back links and gain the benefit of user behavior data working for you rather than against you.

It is a quite pointless exercise to rank well for a word/phrase and then have nothing/little on your site that will make the user/searcher satisifed. SEs do not want this to happen... Therefore they are constantly modifying there algo to stop this happening. What SE want is for the searcher to be satisified that the results listed answer their query. SEs algos are being constantly modiffied to achieve this.

Thus it is simple good SEO is doing what the SE want. Because not only is that good SEO now it is good SEO for the fututre..

According to my opinion webmaster should pay attention on single site (in that context) and try to adjust SEO and user friendly goals in the same site.

Why can't there be a balance? You shouldn't be worrying about which one's better, try your best to make sites both SEO and user-friendly.

The main purpose of any website is generating the revenue form the user. So it is most important that your site must be designed from the user point of view. SEO is a technique which help you in promoting your website among the search engines. In my view you have to take care of both aspect in your single website. That will be more benifitial for you.

Should read... The main purpose of some websites is generating the revenue for the owner. .....

In the past, the SEOed site had a huge advantage. Now, we are reaching a time when you must have both.

Simply put - YES!

SEO nowadays is not confined to on page factors and meta tags. Now SEO primarily consists of how users interact with your site. Number of visits, Page views/ visit, Time Spent on the site, Bounce Rate etc all play a vital role in improving the ranks of a website.

And the most important thing in today's site optimization is links...and webmasters care about informative and user-friendly sources to link to...they don't care how nicely you have framed your Meta Tags and Alts...if they feel that your website won't benefit their visitors...you get no links.

Hence all your hard-work put in making the site on-page wise SEO perfect goes in vain.

Yes your sites should be optimized for search engines but keeping in mind what your users want. You have to maintain the balance otherwise you wont get maximum out of your investment in terms of time and money.

It's easy enough to balance both. What good is an optimized site without visitors, right? Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor and try to see if you can stand browsing your site. When you're pleased with how your site look, apply the seo techniques that you want without messing up your site's interface.

personally my opinion about this is that a site should first make it good to search engines before its user to be able to build its credibility among its users...

I think you missed what gazzahk said in his first post: