I'm tired of this nonsense that suggests a "non-designed" site will be more successful because people are sensitive to using applications that aren't under the thumb of the man. Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that's all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.
Wow, if that's the only reason Craigslist or Myspace became successful then screw design. Kill it until it is dead, dead, dead. I'm hoping on the first flight to Ohio to hire a former employee who is an excellent color-blind programmer.
We'll create an application for sharing ideas, poetry, photos, discussions, classified ads all related to rainbows and puppy dogs. It will look like the Orange County Register coming down from life-long heroin abuse but who cares because that the site looks like a cow's behind is the only thing that's needed to draw in the masses. Content? Sure it will suck but who cares?! It's all about the neon green type on yellow backgrounds that makes or breaks a multi-million dollar operation in the making.
Damn! I've struck gold! Quit your day job people, it doesn't matter if you have a good idea, it just doesn't matter. Go into Microsoft Frontpage and select Build > Community > Non-Designed > Ugly > Cash Cow and just wait for someone to offer hundreds-of-millions to buy you out.
Shhhh don't spread the word, I mean if we all start these kind of sites eventually one of us will try to out do the other one and go text only. ZOMG strike what I've said, all of it. Screw design, even the "non-design" because the next greatest thing is text-only.
Do you know how killer my text-only social app is going to be? And not because it might be fun or look interesting to passers-by. No. It's going to flatten Myspace and Ebay because it's text only and that is the ultimate in "non-design". That's all I need, an application with the design being zero, or one-lower. The only way to beat that is to trade notes in class or hang an index card on the community board in Starbucks. And hey, who the hell needs web standards when it's just text. Brilliant!
Wow, I'm so excited I can't believe no one has thought of this. It will be like the old days of text-only applications:
I'll call it tWorld and it's going to rock because you'll be able to post tPhotos (photos converted into ASCII text of course) on your tBlog and share smack with your tFriends and sell them stuff through tAuctions. Oh wait. Hmmm, is that lower case 't' thing too designed? Do you think people will wonder if this is all just a play by Proctor and Gambel to sneak under the suckdar and create more generations of global corporate product slaves?
Dang, maybe this idea isn't so hot after all.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
Zing! I love it when you get all fired up. Well said :D
Like Jason Fried likes to say, instead one one-upping your competitors, one-down them. Seems like these guys are one-downing..... waaaay dowwwwwn. Waaaay down.
Jason Fried was talking more about functionality.
MySpcae has definitely been successful in spite of it's ugly look and horrible user interface.
Preach on brother! I couldn't agree more.
I think most of these people who are going are saying "ugly" is better than "well-designed" are simply confusing "design" with "style."
Something can definitely be both ugly and well-designed. MySpace is poorly-designed and ugly. But a lot of the other sites that get mentioned in conversations like this (Google, craigslist, etc.) are actually quite well-designed, they're just ugly.
Style is a subset of design, but most people don't get that. People think they're one in the same.
Very true Jeff.
Amen and Jeff has the right of it.
I've been waiting for you to get riled up again. This is a great topic for it as well. I couldn't agree more. ASCII art and text are the future. We all know history repeats itself.
If ugly design is good design, then it looks like the 64 million myspacers have already one downed us.
Wow, I might as well give up now.
Glad I'm not the only one that thought that article was absurd.
I can't wait for the future headlines:
"MySpace User Hired for NYTimes Redesign"
"Her page was just so ugly how could we not hire her?" - Khoi Vinh
I think the reason why everyone's all uppity about ugly sites being so wonderful is because historically not all good looking sites did a whole heckuva lot.
So along comes a colour-blind C++ coder and throws together something that functions well and even though you have a brain aneurism every time you visit the thing, you can still get done what you want to get done.
The lesson here is "design doesn't make the site", it just makes it better.
Meatspace... heh, I love it.
Excellent - I've been reading all these little one-line rebuttals in people's sidebars the last few days, and you're the first one I've seen to address this fully. Thanks!
"undesigned is good" is another slice of the same Jakob Nielsen "screw the art fags" pie. A little bit of truth mixed with a big scoop of disdain for elitist coastal liberal designers with their black turtlenecks and lattes and Priuses and attitudes. Imagine Cartman saying "I hate you guys.. seriously.. I seriously hate you guys"
I have an idea for one-better than text-only. Since minimalist design is all the rage nowadays, just go with a blank white page. Who needs text? :)
Thank you. Thank you for summing up my thoughts and emotions in a one page article. Fantastic!
Now for what I believe to be the more important issue: how do we fix theis ever-present problem?
@Mike: Text really is the wave of the future.. Think about how many people read this through RSS, rather than through the actual HTML page.
History does indeed repeat itself.
I think the real reason why Myspace is so hot right now is because you can log on and hook up with hot babes for free. Craigslist is free also. I'd put up with a crapy website if their product was good and I could get it for free.
I wouldn't necessarily argue this myself, but I've heard some people say that from a branding perspective, fancy hipster high-falutin' design scares a lot of people away while chintzy cheap design makes these same people feel welcome. There's a reason, these people say, why WalMart ads don't look the same as Cartier ads, or why Microsoft doesn't look like Apple: What we snobby designers call "good design" isn't necessarily "good design" for a lot of other people.
To a lot of us, Khoi's black-and-white-and-Helvetica subtraction.com is a beautiful web site. We hip web designers love us some minimalism! But I'd bet a million bucks that if you polled the general public about what they thought of subtraction, you'd get a net negative. They'd find it boring, dry, cold. When I showed my mom the Behavior site, and mind you she's in the advertising industry, she said "It's a little boring. I don't like Helvetica, it has no personality"
All that being said, given a choice I'd rather work on the "good design" stuff, stuff for clients who not only appreciate good design, but more importantly whose customers also appreciate good design.
Conversely, I'm not sure I could in good conscience recommend that, for example, eBay should change their design to something more minimal and elegant when they've done so very well with kitschy design.
Still, it's just idiocy to argue that "ugliness sells" or even that "prettyness is irrelevant". I think a more useful point is that different audiences have different tastes. That said, it's clearly possible to make a design better without making it in appropriate to the audience: Target and iPod have shown that sophisticated design can sell. That said, I think the jury is still out: there aren't enough examples like those to counter the far-more-plentiful examples of people making billions from products anybody on this blog would be ashamed to even look at. I hope we can make more examples.
Jeff Croft: Good point regarding "style". A site can have (to us) a poor sense of style but still practice good web design in most other respects. Craigslist is, indeed, a good example of this.
If you were in arm's reach I'd slap you on the back. I've been fuming about this "trend" of "industry thought leaders" sounding like "utter tards" spouting this stuff about how design is useless because ugly is better. Ugly is lazy. Ugly is a copout.
INVENTORY
You have: dressing gown, towel, toothbrush, that thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is, no sense.
I think the notion that design is useless is just as absurd as the notion that design will save humanity. Jeff Croft sums it up nicely--design in a larger sense is not about making things look pretty, though in my opinion that's where it ends for a lot of designers, perhaps particularly on the web.
I can't (or won't) offer a universal definition for design, but for me at least, design is about manufacturing an experience with ideas and things. While presentation and other aesthetic concerns certainly play a role in some cases, they are not always the most important factor. In too many cases, I think, people conflate appealing visual appearance with "good design"; the two are related but not congruent concepts.
Don't slam text. We're not done with it yet :)
Sharp as always, thankyou for doing this in style!
Good call. Ugly sites with bad interfaces probably succeed because they fill some niche; even if something better and/or prettier comes along, many users might not switch, simple because it’s a pain in the buttocks.
Uh, the type face on your text only site was designed. It gives you a score .001 in the design collum, so the apocolypse will go back on stand by.
Though un-designed sites are painful to look at, in the end they are about function. The perceived ease of use for the user to search postings on Craigslist or view profiles on MySpace is what drives those sites, not design. Do most of us believe they could be well-designed and still easy to use? YES! The better question is do most of their intended audiences care? Content is indeed king. Sometimes in spite of bad design.
It's just a matter of some guy who is getting a lot of traffic and has no idea why, so he makes up some stupid explanation. I run into this all the time with web design clients.
Dumb Client - "People come back because of my 37minute flash intro, so don't get rid of that."
Me - "You're analytics say they only spend 8 seconds on the intro then they click skip intro button."
Dumb Client - "Let's delete the skip intro button, then people will come back even more!"
You need coffee, Greg. And a hug.
Related, but not exactly a parallel, is the packaging design of generic grocery items. Plain, boring, Arial-ized, primary colors, high-contrasty; but to the point. Lazy, yes.
Well-designed too, though not well-styled. They know their target is the bargain-shopper. I read somewhere about someone wanting to grow out of the generic space and their hired agency designed a really nice label for the same exact product(s).
Disastrous results, sales plummeted. Naturally there are many factors that go into why, e.g. now competing with other proven well-styled brands and not directly viewed as competitor of other generic brands; but it obvious that being viewed as generic gives them the exposure they need - grocery equivalent of <blink> Goes w/out saying: reverted back to previous label.
Greg, text is so 2006! You need to go binary and use a decoder ring. That's the ultimate in undesign.
01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 00111101 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01100111 01101110
The guys over at UX Magazine seem to be thinking the same
Heheh. My answer is: your font is too small. :-)
Seriously, it is.
It's hard to read on my high res screen. It made me bump up the font size.
See, I think that's the point: is it pretty? Yes. Is it usable? Not as usable as if you had made the font size bigger, albeit uglier.
The top sites work HARD at usability first, aesthetics second.
That's the lesson.
Robert my fonts have been too small way longer than yours have been too big. If I blogged for a living I would be concerned about providing a large print edition.
Exactly how do top sites (and what is a top site anyway?) work hard on usability? I assume you're referring to sites like Craigslist, Myspace, or Plettyoffish so I fail to see where any usability testing was done otherwise those sites would look different than they do today. Anyone who's done any kind of usability testing would know this to be true.
Robert, I agree. A pretty page that does nothing is, well, nothing. Thus, you are correct in saying that top sites work hard at usability first and aestehtics second.
However, the notion that a "non-designed" site will be more successful then a "designed" site seems a bit far fetched.
Lets assume for a minute that we have two identical sites. Both do the same thing in the same way. The URLs are only slightly different. Heck, they might even be running the same backend PHP scripts. The only difference is that one is less pretty then the other (that is not to say the prettier one is less functional). According to your line of reasoning, the site that is ugglier will be more successful. I simply fail to see how that makes any sense whatsoever.
LOVE the post title by the way. You'd have to be a super nerd to get it, and I'm totally a super nerd.
@Robert - Design or "aesthetics" is not some coat of paint you put on at the end of a project. The assumption that small fonts are "pretty" and large fonts are "ugly" demonstrates a sophomoric understanding of design. I could take the very same font and color family, and DESIGN a logo/ad/website whatever, for Laura Ashley or Harley Davidson. It's not about fonts or drop shadows or the "worn" look. It's not about taking a little of this, and a little of that, and making something pretty. Good design connects with the viewer emotionally, on a gut level. And to consider connecting with you customer on a gut level SECOND, or as an afterthought, would be ill-advised.
@Robert -- Greg's font issues aside, design for the Web is definitely about usability. (It's also about knowing your audience which allows Greg to get off the hook with his smallish font. Which, by the way, is easily resized in, oh, every browser aside from Internet Explorer...) When we set out to redesign Craigslist (for our SXSW panel) our main focus was trying to make it easier to use and read, etc. Sure we wanted to make it more appealing from a visual sense as well, but that was just a piece of it.
Why is it so hard for people to get their mind around this?
Design goes way beyond aesthetics. A good Web design would be usable AND functional. These things are mutually exclusive as people tend to make them out to be.
Seriously, I don't want to pick on you but if you're going to talk design you need to get the basics down first. Ugly vs. Pretty is a vast over-simplification when it comes to designing for use. On most projects I work on 80-90% of my job as a designer is to make sure something is understood (either usable, readable, etc.) and while some of that involves making something aesthetically pleasing there is WAY more to it.
Look at Morville's honeycomb a good Web (or interface or experience) designer takes into account all of those things.
Please, people, educate yourself just a bit before you make comments like "MySpace is popular BECAUSE it doesn’t look professional." That's an assumption that in my professional opinion is incorrect. (There is no proof of this either way, so we talking opinions here.)
My thinking is that MySpace is popular despite the fact it's ugly (why in the world would MySpace want to look professional?) and more importantly despite the fact that it's a total nightmare to use.
We're MySpace redesigned based on the facets within Morville's honeycomb my guess is that it could be even more successful.
As well, if this theory is true, why is Facebook doing so well?? It's designed very well and has some VERY talented designers on staff...
Great post! nuff said.
I do not agree with you at all. The content and usability of a web site or web application is what matters the most.
Yes, the look of the site cannot be hideous, as that will make anyone close the browser very quick, however, a clean look such as the one that Google sports is very effective. I have seen plenty of sites where designers have spent countless hours in Photoshop using the latest graphical techniques, but a clean white design is as much appreciated (if not more) in my books.
At the end of the day people look at the content and usability of a site and/or web application, and you cannot tell me that the Google look has not been effective for them � simple little graphic at the top (which was created years, years ago), some text, and a collection of hyperlinks.
Some people just get carried away by looking into graphical design too much.
DD i'm going to have to disagree with you and say Google is plain. This is what it should look like.
Simplicity, functionality and power have all always been in conflict with beauty. It’s like politics.
You meet this wow lady, you get excited by her looks, her inner “functionality” and character is irrelevant at the time.
As time passes beauty fades, since you are over exposed to it, and what you are looking for is real beauty, stuff like ethics, kindness and all. Being beauty is not enough. Its’ like Flash (macromedia flash).
In conclusion, I believe those all plain and successful sites depend on their deep beauty and power rather than their outer looks. In the long run, that is what matters, too much beauty gets you tired and bored.
What is MySpace?
I agree with Jon Hicks, you have a way with words that I wish I had. Greg for (design) president :p
I love you.
hey! i am down with youse on this one. put me down for 100K:
,__o
_-\ _ (*)/'(*)
last tTunes: "I Text messaged You Late Last Night" by Ascii Fonts.
When gorgeously-designed and well-branded sites create the RIGHT functionality and content for their customers, and LISTEN to what their customers want, they'll get noticed and adopted more heavily instead of ignored as tired brochure-ware or over-sexed online advertising. Design and content/functionality shouldn't be an an either-or. But when a site that is designed ugly/poorly has a billion loyal users it's because someone got the desired functionality right for that audience. In fact it was likely cobbled together out of need than a marketing-driven agenda. Designers need to take note of that and do what they can to make it even MORE engaging, relevant, useful and desirable.... seductive, etc. but never instead of what people use it for. OF COURSE design matters, more than ever as UI's get more complex. But never at the self-serving expense of exactly the right content or functionality, designers might as well stop wasting their time creating self-serving over-branded portfolio pieces for ill-informed clients that have little relevance with what real customers crave. It's about relevancy. Design needs relevancy, relevancy needs design.
I think someone almost had the point...
The ugly sites almost all offer free services. It can be functional and ugly if it's free. But if you are going to ask for a credit card number you had better look like a real viable company with a site that someone designed. Ebay may be ugly, but at least it looks like a really company.
Did someone just say they love you?
Beauty is only skin deep
George Papadakis: I can't agree more. I think that's what it's all about, if a designer can capture that inner beauty and transcend it on to the outermost layer; they then have a beautiful design. Ugly and Pretty are just too subjective a quantifier to judge anything of value by.
What's pretty today might be ugly tomorrow, what I find pretty might be ugly to someone else. Any designer who sets about to design, just to make it look pretty, is probably headed down the wrong path.
It's like a box of Wheaties with a Tiger Woods image on the box, that might make me buy the product, but if what's inside tastes like crap, then the design has failed.
So my question is: is it ethically right for designers to package something to look pretty, when they know everything inside is ugly!?
Great designs have to be intriguing initially, make the user want to touch it, is intuitive once they have touched it, instantly addictive, and constantly evolving to maintain the addiction level. I can't think of a better example than the iPod.
Yeah, I don't understand this "revelation" either. eBay and Craigslist are huge because of what they do, not because of how it looks. MySpace is the one I can't figure out -- the design and the UI are both nightmares.
Did someone just say they love you?
Yeah they did. So I guess that means it's time to order the leather jacket and rockst@r RV.
eBay and Craigslist are huge because of what they do, not because of how it looks.
Exactly! But according to Mr. Bigfont (my new pet name for Scoble) sites like Craigslist, Google, MySpace, etc. owe their success in large part to non-design. I don't think anyone disagrees that function is what makes an application or service popular. That said, good design, not pretty — this is the web, not Trading Spaces — would help increase adoption, retention, and ultimately the success of the app.
So my question is: is it ethically right for designers to package something to look pretty, when they know everything inside is ugly!?
Great question! I don't think it's a matter of ethics as doing work that lets you sleep at night.
... is it ethically right for designers to package something to look pretty, when they know everything inside is ugly!?
Is it ethical for a designer to re-package something to look pretty for a client who is already rolling in mad loot using a shitty design?
Listen, I really, really want to believe you on this one, Greg, but I can't. Your font is just way too small, and your site looks too good. How can I trust you—nay, anyone—with a design this sharp?
So long Airbag…I'm not a sucker you know. I'm going to hang out on MySpace, which is obviously successful because it put usability over design. I can only assume that having Camino crash at every other profile there is due to the massive usability.
Sincerely,
Not a Sucker
The design/style, or whatever you want to call it, of myspace has no effect on it's popularity, positively or negatively. It just goes to show that the internet is still a vast landscape with many effective mediums. 95% of the people who surf the internet (and probably 98% of those who use myspace) aren't even design conscience yet.
It's just a slap in the face of all the elitist "design-obsessed" bloggers who thought they knew the direction the web was going. Trust me, you guys haven't been THAT influential.
This is like Trent Reznor going on MTV.com and wondering why all musicians (country, R&B, etc.) don't sound like NIN.
...5% of the people who surf the internet (and probably 98% of those who use myspace) aren't even design conscience yet.
I'd love to see your research that supports this statement. Please tell me you didn't just come up with some random numbers.
Trust me, you guys haven't been THAT influential.
For someone who can't make it past hacking a Blogger template you seem to know a lot about design and what influence (or not) web standards has had on online design. Wait a sec, wasn't your blog design somehow influenced by the design-obsesed? No, it was DESIGNED by the same people your trying to slam.
I'm not slamming anybody, I'm just saying that a very LARGE portion (sorry, I don't have scientific data, and neither do you) of internet goers aren't design conscience. Not by their choice, but simply because they have no idea what "good design" is versus "bad design."
I agree with you to an extent, that bad design doesn't add to a site's popularity. I'm just saying that with something like myspace, it's a non-factor. Look at the people on myspace, seriously. Do you think those people really care what their site looks like? They aren't professionals, they aren't trying to sell something. Most of them are high school kids who have a 2 second attention span (I'm generalizing, forgive me) looking to post pictures and find booty calls. The design fits the crowd over there.
But thanks for dissing my site. I love yours and I visit it about thrice a week, sometimes more. It's a nice mix of good design with quality content, something of which I'm definitely not talented enough to produce. But, the fact that you took the time to visit my site and classify me as a blogger hack is the very definition of design-elitism. Regardless, I love the design-obsessed. I see sites everyday that blow my mind, this being one of them. I'm glad folks like yourself have paved the way for hacks like me. But, don't be so narrow minded in thinking it should be the only effective way to have a popular site.
I'm not slamming anybody...
That's not how I read it.
sorry, I don't have scientific data, and neither do you
I'm not looking for scientific data, just something to back up your statement as you spoke as if you had a depth of knowledge on the subject. I have a good collection of books that discuss in great detail how design improves products, services, governments, etc. just as I have books on how function does the same.
I love yours and I visit it about thrice a week, sometimes more. It's a nice mix of good design with quality content, something of which I'm definitely not talented enough to produce.
Now that's the worst thing you've said so far. If I can do it, so can you. I've got eleven years on you. Lets talk when you're thirty-four and we'll contrast and compare were you are today with where you will be if you put in the time and effort into improving.
But, don't be so narrow minded in thinking it should be the only effective way to have a popular site.
If anyone is narrow minded it's people like Robert Scoable who think that online design is worthless and the lack of it drives success on the Internet. What a tool.
"Not by their choice, but simply because they have no idea what 'good design' is versus 'bad design.'"
That's bullshit. Sorry for being harsh, but that's what it is. That's like saying someone who isn't a musician can't tell the difference between good music and bad music. Or someone who isn't a filmmaker can't decide if the movie they just watched was good or not. Bullshit. People can tell when something works, and when it doesn't. That's design. Why do you think the iPod is so popular? Because it works. Why does it work? Because of its great design.
Craigslist works. It works well. That's why it's successful. It's ugly -- but it's well-designed, and that's why it works. Same goes with Google. People like it because it works. Sometimes desirable content can make something successful in spite of a poor design (see MySpace and most porn sites) -- but that's the exception, not the rule.
Bottom line: when design is good, it's out of people's way. Most people don't notice when they're using something that is well-designed. Most people do notice when design sucks. I assure you, people can tell the difference, even if they don't know they're telling the difference.
"That's like saying someone who isn't a musician can't tell the difference between good music and bad music. Or someone who isn't a filmmaker can't decide if the movie they just watched was good or not."
Oh, so now we are bringing taste into the argument? So you are telling me that teenage boys and girls can tell the difference between good music and bad music?
Look, I agree with you guys. I don't think myspace's crappy design is contributing to it's popularity, but I also don't think it's hurting it. The existence of this post in general suggests that the design-obsessed (I don't mean this in a bad way) blogosphere is taken aback by the fact that a large portion of web users aren't yet aesthetically inclined to their liking. The web is still driven by function.
Thank you, Greg, this post was great. I liken the people that agree with Scoble's lament to someone ignoring Julia Child's advice on creating a quiche just because they think they know everything about cooking eggs.
I echo Jeff Croft's last paragraph: design works best when it's seamless.
"Oh, so now we are bringing taste into the argument? So you are telling me that teenage boys and girls can tell the difference between good music and bad music?"
"Good" and "bad" are totally subjective. I'm telling you that teenage boys and girls can easily tell what they like and what they don't. Just the same, everyone can easily tell when something is well-designed. They may not know to call it that, but people say things all the time like, "I like Google. It's fast and easy and gives me good search results." What they're really saying is, "it's well-designed."
"The existence of this post in general suggests that the design-obsessed (I don't mean this in a bad way) blogosphere is taken aback by the fact that a large portion of web users aren't yet aesthetically inclined to their liking."
You use of the word "aesthetically" is evidence that you are still confused about the difference between "style" and "design."
I wasn't trying to pick on you individually, ThetaFarm. I was just irritated by your suggestion that design is irrelevant (because people "can't tell the difference"). I don't believe that's true. I believe design is very relevant and people do often flock to well-designed things because of their design, even if they don't know that's why they're flocking.
free dating sites and other sites with FREE **** shouldn't be considered while comparing. The reason is obvious. its like comparing microsoft.com to xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.com
Free dating sites? Who said anything about free dating sites?
And, last I checked, microsoft.com was free and xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.com wasn't.
(If you know of free xxx sites, let's talk.)
give any myspace user a choice. microsoft.com or free-xxx-xxx.com... and see what he visits first.
myspace, craigslist, google and all other "successful" text sites have traces of p*rn. so it doesn't need any design.
text alone may not be enough. a bit of free prn would do the trick.
google -- awesome! the biggest porn search engine in the world. i can bet the most search word on google is related to p*rn, and the most revenue is from that too.
the whole thing pisses me off too mang ... can't even begin to get into how many things are wrong with the "non-design"=success argument
i'd say it's just these fools making a ridiculous argument to stir things up and generate some traffic for their sites ... justifying they're own laziness ... alleviating them from spending time actually making their sites look decent, etc, etc
google - successful because of its "bad" design ... ... awwe eff it ... i'm not even going to get started, the arguments against this "ugly"=successful hubbub have all been made and are all pretty valid
excellent post btw : )
At this point I would say no one knows for sure how much "style" (pretty vs ugly) effects successful websites like Myspace or criaglist.
I think most people agree that they are successful because of the services they provide -
However the question is, would they be more or less
That is would more people use myspace if it was pretty, or would more people be turned off by it if it was pretty? I don't think there is any easy way to find out...
And lets not forget that at the end of the day style is a very subjective element.
Hey ... I am colorblind, I program and I design ... so there :o
tAwesome tPost...tWell tDone
What's all this talk about "pretty".
Who the hell said design was pretty? Design is not superficial vanity, it's better communication.
And I fail to see how something well designed (not pretty) would decrease the use or success of a web site/application/community.
I think another part of the equation is that the word "pretty" keeps getting thrown around as the equivalent of "design" and/or "style". Let's not forget that something can be designed beautifully yet still be completely inappropriate and therefor ineffective or even detrimental to business goals. Visual design is subjective to taste but with careful research can be created to appeal to the intended audience.
Nobody so far has mentioned that design is different from aesthetics and style. Nobody. Let's just make this clear because I hate it when people neglect to rectify the biggest misunderstanding in the conversation.
@We Todd Did -- Quite a few people mentioned that actually. I realize there are quite a few comments to wade through, but it's in there.
"Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that's all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers."
Very nice!!!
Great post!
Sure, content is king, but what's wrong with good design delivering said content effeciently and effectively?
I fail to see Scoable's logic. When I see color-blind sites with ugly text, I don't think authentic. Rather, the first thing that comes to my mind is SCAM! I go to google or ebay because they've established their authenticity first, not the other way around!
Google, craigslist, and ebay have all been around since the earlier days of the web when it was, well, uglier, and have started building a user base since then. That they remain so successful has nothing to do with how their site looks. I'm not so sure about myspace, but I think they've hit the right niche.
I remember the first time I visited craigslist it took me 3 mins to find the tiny link to orange county. Wouldn't my experience be better if I could find that link more quickly because the design was improved?
@We Did Todd -- Hello? I've mentioned it about 10 minute, and so have others. please read all the comments before making a sweeping statement like, "nobody has...
I think it's Proctor and Gamble not Proctor and Gambel. Sorry, that was buggin me a bit.
craigslist isn't pretty but it isn't as bad as some of the "i'm making millions with my ugly adsense enabled site" category.
nice!
hate to say it but myspace is not a poor design. It may not look visually to be the next big rage, but using it has been a dream come true to many o' peps. Let's go back before Myspace to a site called Friendster. IT sucked, took years to load each page, information architecture was not thought out or even considered. It was a nightmare to use! Then came Myspace. The pages loaded so da** fast, everything was laid out well. Everything was easy to find. It was extremely intuitive and most of all . . .You could actually change the design adding a level of interactivity and personal expression NOT found on any other online social site. Bad design? To me it was brilliant design. As someone previously mentioned, we are confusing design with style. When Design meet the internet there was a whole new world added to it's meaning. Things like usability contributes more to a websites success than any other aspect of design. The bottom line is; User centered Interface Design. If it's easy to use and enjoyable, people will love it. Example, consider the users goals, needs, and many tasks they will wish to perform on the site you are creating, then design for them. Both Ebay and Myspace show this type of thought and understanding.
Plentyoffish.com is successful because people are lonely. Period. They couldn't give cupids tinkle about font decoration or bg-color. They're just looking for a friend.
If Plentyoffish.com really " is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google" I'd be ready to bet cold hard cash it would earn more if the site had a better design (style). The backend (design) is obviously working so why not fix the frontend (style).
I drive a Volvo (2005) primarily for two reasons. 1) The underlying technology that went into the cars design and 2) the new body/interior style. I wouldn't have considered a Volvo five years ago because they looked so boxy and plain.
@Robert Scoble. You're reaching dude. Too bad.
I said "They couldn't give cupids tinkle about font decoration or bg-color. They're just looking for a friend."
What I mean is.... the site/service helps them accomplish what they want to do. Find a companion. But, I seriously doubt anyone would stop using the site if it looked better. Suggesting that the site is successful because it lacks style is just silly.
I would suggest the next time you hear that argument that you have that person read Donald Norman's book titled "Emotional Design, specifically pgs 12-13 of the paperback version. In it Norman talks about a study done by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio who studies people who had suffered brain injuries that impaired their emotional systems. Even though they were normal looking, they were unable to make decisions or function effectively in the world. To sum it up, when presented with 2 equally reasonable choices, they were unable to make a decision. This is because emotion effects our decision making process and also aids us in everyday life.
Where am I going with this?
Emotion is influenced by aesthetic pleasing as well as also horribly ugly design (and everything that fits into the middle.
Design is crucial, especially in a decision making process. Now if your building an app for some customer service function that is internal within a company, maybe you can cut back on the design. However you still need to show priority items on each screen, and even if it doesn't have pretty colors it should still make good use of layout design. Is information architecture & usability important, absolutely, but they should be also clearly balanced with some form of well thought out design as well. I've seen enough usability studies to validate this (especially with comments from users who have stated as much).
All designers value design. A simple statement, to be sure, but the most true...it's why we so vehemently defend design and asthetics. It's our bread and butter, and for some, our purpose in life. But the typical indivdual (non-designer) has little concern for any of this. I agree with the rest who say that myspace, etc. is successful IN SPITE of bad design, but not BECAUSE of it.
I love the "Wheaties" reference made a few days ago, but it's actually not quite complete. Think of these metaphors:
You've designed the Wheaties box to appeal to people who like sports by putting a sports-related icon in the design. This creates the desire to purchase Wheaties...your design is successful. Now if the Wheaties taste like sh**, that is poor design of the cereal, but not of the box.
Again, what if you had 1,000 gold coins, but it was contained in a dirty canvas bag. Even looking at the bag you know that if you lifted it, the bag would rip, and coins would go everywhere, but Jeeze-Loweeze! It's GOLD, man! GOLD! Who cares what the container is!
So if the gold was in a solid steel safe with wheel castors, it would definately be a better design, but...IT'S GOLD, MAN!
So basically, I don't think I'm saying anything that hasn't already been said here, but hopefully solidifying it a bit more. But now, of course, we have to discuss those few times when anti-design IS design (from a stylistic point of view) versus just plain, poorly formatted sites.
I wonder if the comments on this page reveal more about designers than design itself. Great read, Greg!
Its so true what you said, I think lot of people consider design and branding as second most important aspect of a project. Lot of people develop apps and the push it out there with no thought given to actual design and hope that one day some major big player will come and buy them out like with the dot com times.
Looks like the same thing is happening with web 2.0 unfortunately people are build apps which just has a lot of buzz around like mixing Ajax and so forth but not realising at the end of the day the market they are building the apps for. They are just quick to put something out there and hope that Google or Microsoft will buy them out someday. Well sometimes dreams come true, but in most cases I believe it’s better to make an effort to build an application which wills server a purpose do common good to the human kind, these are apps which will survive in the end. eBay and Amazon has survived the .com boom now they should looking at bringing their branding and visual elements up the current level as well. They have a good application why not enhance it with a usable front end.
This is my thoughts on educating both myself and other people in the process, I have being through back end programming to front end, knowing the MVC architecture (model view controller) and now I want to make application which will cater for human needs. Its easier said than done, a lot of programmer/developer knowingly or not knowingly fall into the trap since they become experts in their own area. You have step back and try to think from a user’s point of view. So I am trying to pick up some of these ugly site in my design blog DesignWhys and convert them with nicer human readable user interfaces. And apply Design patterns (in UI perspective) and Microformats in the process so that people would be able to reuse components in the end...
Hope this all makes sense, as they say it takes a different line of thinking a much simpler line to make a change we can all concentrate on making complex apps however the challenge is to make more usable apps with nicer interfaces.
Greg sez: "Who the hell said design was pretty? Design is not superficial vanity, it's better communication."
Hey Greg-- if design isn't about pretty... Then why *IS* the font size on your site so damn small? :-)
I can't help but think that all this discussion misses a major point - know your audience(s). As designers we obviously value 'good design'. But to the average Joe, maybe they just don't know any better - for them; or maybe they don't care. Design, ultimately is subjective (though I know we can all argue for a 'better' design).
I think that sometimes it's not that people think ugly is better; perhaps it's just their taste. Perhaps they truly think something ugly actually is well designed - to them.
Add to this the trend of non-conformism, which never seems to go away. Lots of sites thrive on being ugly by choice, rather than just having been designed by anyone. Perhaps MySpace does well for a couple of reasons: 1) provides a service the users want, and 2) It doesn't conform to the high-society - somewhat higher-than-thou mentality that an otherwise 'well designed' site may provoke.
Ultimately it seems that you need to know your audience and design accordingly. If your audience is a world of teenagers who just want a place to hang out - maybe design isn't as necessary. If you are a corporate retail brand, it's all about the image - so you pour a lot of money into every last pixel of your site.
You hit the nail on the head.
Oh, and I wanted to congradulate you on the choice of ATDT for a title. Very subtle.