Is Ugly the new Black?
March 27th, 2006
Site Reference gives us The Surprising Truth About Ugly Design.
I believe this is just an me-too rehash of a post from the great Robert Scoble.
Basically, the argument is simple: look at PlentyOfFish.com, MySpace.com, and Craigslist.com and you find examples of how “ugly sites” can succeed while many pretty sites have failed. Therefore, the argument continues, ugly is the new black.
Karl Long points us to Andy Rutlage’s interesting rant and also makes the interesting point that PlentyOfFish, MySpace, and Craigslist are all free services — it’s easy to look past visual design when the price is right.
To me, what this is really about is there are instances where the content is so powerful that aesthetic/visual design can fall by the wayside and the site still perform well (by whatever objectives of performance you want to put to it).
The thing is there is nothing new here. Move along. Nothing here to see.
eBay, in it’s early incarnations, was never considered a slick design.
Yahoo was fairly dull.
HotWired was hideous in their graphical choices.
People will gravitate to good content in practically any container you put it in.
When does aesthetic/visual design play a role? Ask the iPod designers.
At some point, (and I don’t quite know where that point is at this time,) fashion, visual appeal, and aesthetic comfort becomes a priority to the audience. At that point, you better be ready or else you’ll look dated and amateurish. But get there too early and you’re wasting valuable resources on something users don’t care about.
It’s a fine balance that I believe we’re only beginning to get our heads around.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:17 am
Well, from my product design background, I know that aesthetics can come into play when there’s bigger competition.
I’ve worked for a company that design products, and one of their markets was and still is designing housings for machines (weaving machines, machines that do laser cutting, etc). Products, in a sense, that do not need any design (the aesthetics part of the design spectrum I mean). Yet, all weaving machines, at a certain point, start to be as fast as eachother, and as cheap as eachother (well, almost). And to differentiate, some companies started to ask the company I worked for to design housings. Mostly a metal or plastic plate or 3. But it made them look different from the competition.
And in some cases, such jobs came from high-end companies. In that case, it was also a way to differentiate, but from the crowd.
March 27th, 2006 at 11:03 am
It’s kind of like dating - you are first attracted to the beauty but what is inside is what keeps you coming back for more (or so my husband tells me)
March 27th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Without getting into the typical form vs. function debate (of course usability and usefulness matters), I’ll explain things the way I do whenever a client of mine makes this assertion. First of all, dismissing visual design as just a matter of “making things pretty” cuts off your ability to communicate with your customers at the knees. Design is a solution to communication not mere styling. Each product (via its interface design) needs to “tell” users what features it offers (its utility), how to use those features (its usability), and why they should care (its desirability).
Second, even if you deliberately don’t think about your site’s personality during the design process, you will end up with one anyway. The colors, content, and visual elements (or lack of all three) of your Web site all make an impression on your audience, intentional or not. Therefore, it is in your best interests to be aware of the personality you are creating for your site and make certain it is telling the story you want.
Many sites with a poor visual presentation remain popular on the merits of their content alone. But does their audience enjoy bumping through the site’s awkward graphics and hard to read labels? No, but the personality of the content (it could be high quality, funny, worthwhile, and more) makes the rest bearable. Would their audience be happier if the personality of the presentation matched the personality of the content? Of course. They like the content, don’t they? Such a site would be well served to improve their presentation. Not only would it enrich their current customers’ experience, but a presentation that reflects the site’s content would tell the site’s story to newcomers as well. Hey, we have quality content, come take a look.
March 27th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
I’ve been trying to figure out the overall decline of design (by design I mean graphic design, not necessarily UI design) as a value on the Web. It seems to be a combination of companies not wanting to spend like the ’90s on million dollar interfaces (like @Home) and more tech-driven concepts (like MySpace) where no one even considers the look of things because there’s no one involved who does that as a profession. Also poor interface design gave good graphic design a bad name.
To someone who can’t see the value of design, there’s no convincing them. My background is in publishing and I’ve watched sites slowly become clones of each other over the last 5 years. At this point the only design on the Web is happening on advertising websites and the more self-indulgent content sites like nationalgeographic.com.
I’m hoping that the trend will change as broadband takes over and there is less and less to distinguish one website from another. As Vincent says, competition may bring back “cosmetic” design as they called it at one publisher I worked at.
March 28th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
In the case of MySpace, I would argue that technically, it’s not the content that brings people but rather the features. I’ve been working on a social networking / virtual community project for the last seven months, and I’ve spent countless hours poring over MySpace and its competitors. The argument I’ve made is that despite its near-complete lack of “design,” MySpace consistently rolls out the new features its users call for. The efficiency that MySpace has had in this regard has really kept it ahead of the curve; Google’s orkut is equally hideous, but due to a lack of amenable features (and exclusivity) has never built the user base MySpace has.
The other thing to note is that younger generations have begun to add their numbers to the web audience, and if MySpace is any indication, these users value customization over good graphic design - they’d simply rather do it themselves, good or bad as that may be.
March 29th, 2006 at 11:01 am
http://www.mavtalk.com isn’t a great design either, but the content keeps me coming back. I like that DB format far better than anyone elses.
April 3rd, 2006 at 7:56 pm
[...] I suppose my point here is that sometimes “ugly” is more effective, if it gets the message across. Maybe ugly is the new black. [...]
July 13th, 2006 at 11:27 am
[...] Comme le dit Jared Spool “Ugly is the new black“. J’ai toujours détesté les designs des sites MySpace et Skyblogs, mais il faut bien l’avouer cette laideur est un atout. En faisant des designs “coloristiquement” paramêtrables et dénués d’identité MySpace et Skyblog permettent à leurs utilisateurs de s’identifier au site. Le design de WAT est beaucoup trop marqué pour un service de réseau social. [...]
September 29th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
[...] Ugly is the new black. [...]
August 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
[...] There seems to be an understandable anxiety amoungst designers that in a technology driven environment works well and looks good may be in conflict. Is it Jacob Neilsen’s ‘Why this site has almost no grahics’ vs Don Norman’s ‘Emotion and Design: Attractive things work better‘? There have been alot of great posts on the web about this. Robert Scroble’s interview with Markus Frind of Plentyoffish is a favorite of mine, he calls it anti-marketing design. In a very old article on the AIGA website David Vogler writes Its Good to be Bad. This piece was written about by to by Joshua Porter as the MySpace Problem. Finally Jared Spool asks Is Ugly the new black? [...]