Web design? Screw aesthetics
drawar.com
drawar.com
Good design only helps if your site is useful; this in particular applies to both blogs (like his) and webapps. He argued recently that:
Do you think it bothers the Gowalla people that they put so much care and effort into the design of everything that they do and Foursquare is still right there with them with a significantly worse design?
That's missing the point. The point is that Foursquare is doing something right, and that something is likely more than just design. I've not looked into the location app space recently, but my guess is that Foursquare reached critical mass before Gowalla did. Connecting an app's value to its design only makes sense when all else is equal.
When Google is brought up as an example of mediocre design that succeeds, people come out from the woodworks to argue that it is actually great design and base it on the success that they have had. I don’t believe it.
I think design only gives you an advantage when you're competing in a space with little or no technical differentiation. In this case, Google has had such a huge technical advantage over its competitors that it didn't matter what design they used anyway.
Minimalist search pages can look better than Google’s without being any bigger.
Making more people click your button is not, on its own, good design. There's more to aesthetics than conversion rates. You can argue aesthetics aren't important, but it's simply not the same subject as the kind of data collecting A/B testing that Google does.
If your design doesn't accomplish a business objective, it may be better, but it is irrelevant to the business.
If data indicates your aesthetic doesn't increase a metric, then ultimately the only rational decision to make is to minimize the cost of your aesthetic. All things being equal, you take the equivalently successful design that imposes the least costs.
If the data indicates that your design decreases a metric, then ultimately the only rational decision is to kill the design.
There are also probably non-obvious cost factors. A much better Google SERP design may be more aesthetically strong, and may not hurt metrics --- it may even marginally improve metrics --- however, if the end result of that aesthetic is that every other page at Google needs to cost more to cohere with the SERP, then, again, it may be irrational to improve the design.
Companies spend a lot of money on design. Companies tell themselves a lot of things about design. Somebody's whole career is predicated on the idea that the lobby of a class A office building in the Chicago Loop needs to be just-so. In the building I'm in now, somebody spent several million dollars to improve the aesthetics. I think that probably has more to do with vanity than it does with business.
Corporate annual reports are a marquee design project. Companies spend serious dollars on them. Berkshire Hathaway does theirs in Word, set in Times New Roman. They seem to be doing OK.
Sell me on aesthetics more? I don't see it.
However, it's very difficult to achieve Apple's near perfect blend of aesthetics & function so I think most people give up and build anyway, making something perfectly functional i.e. Facebook or Gmail, but not awe-inspiring.
I can repeat this all the day: Google search, it's one of the most well designed web applications in the entire web.
GMail? Not so much. I have done some (NDA research) email UI/UX "design" at my company, and by tests (just the second revision), I reduced the lookup (finding items), for first-time computer users by 57% over gmail, by 41% over hotmail, and by more than 700% over ymail (2008). This because of a more cautionary choice of color of the controls. This was the goal.
You don't apply aesthetics to a design you apply a style to a design.
Whether something is aesthetic i grounded in culture, history and so many other things.
The google style is bad by print and 1999 standards, but we have come to like it because judging visual things is not only about how they look but how we feel about them.
About thirty years ago, three companies dreamed up logos that have become so powerful, I don't even have to show you the images to get them to pop up in your head. A sneaker company paid a few hundred dollars for an abstract, upside down wave, a coffee company picked a half-naked mermaid (is there any other kind) that cost them nothing, and a computer company picked [hired a PR firm that picked] a piece of fruit with a bite out of it.
What the images had in common: nothing. They range from abstract to woodcut to groovy. The art of picking a logo, even one for the Olympics, has almost nothing to do with taste or back story. A great logo doesn't mean anything until the brand makes it worth something.
Likewise, great aesthetics/graphics mean nothing until the brand makes it worth something.
Why don't you look at the top colored bar at Hacker News and compute its ratio against the entire page? Why not count the ratio of this comment box? Why does the resize draggie that Chrome puts in the bottom right hand corner of the comment box have a 1:1 ratio? Why does the reply button, and most other buttons online, have a ratio larger than 2:1? All the windows I have open on my screen that are divided into sections don't follow the golden ratio. None of their sizes are the golden rectangle. My monitor doesn't follow the golden ratio. My aesthetically pleasing coffee mugs don't follow the ratio -- wait, the handle's smaller than the width of the brim, but not less than half as small. It must be the golden ratio.