Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI | Hacker News Reader

Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI

usabilitypost.com

23 pointsmarketer11 comments

Crappy post. The cream of any UI crop is able to combine both pretty and usable. The line "The interface is too beautiful, there’s too much of it - it’s distracting because you cannot easily focus on the news stories" is bullshit and I know so every time I use my iPhone.

If there's a problem with the newspond interface then its not usable enough - not too good looking.

That's the point of the post: the newspond interface sacrifices usability for beauty.

No. The newspond interface is an ugly interface because "beauty" in design is about understanding the content. Newspond's creator shows no understanding of information design.

That may be your understanding of "beauty," but it's not the author's.

It's not worth arguing semantics, substitute "prettiness" if it makes you feel better.

It’s not “pretty” either. Perhaps “gaudy” or “пошлость” (Russian for “pretentious banality”) is the word you’re looking for? (Edward Tufte has a graphic: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg )

Not exactly how I read it but close enough - point I'm making is that the two are not mutually exclusive and the newspond interface doesn't "sacrifice" usability - it just doesn't implement do what needs to be done to make it both usable and pretty. The reason the post sucks is because he just says "pretty bad - usable good" which is just a crap argument - do both.

While I agree with what the general gist of the article entails, don't let the UI get in the way, I don't particularly agree with all of the specifics.

My main problem with this article is the fact that the author pits "experience" against "function," and thereby separates the two into different camps. He doesn't have any in-between, wherein there would be a balance of experience _and_ function; instead, he focuses only on the two extremes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with a very functional website. I'm a fan of minimal (functional) design, but at the same time, if you're able to make a site beautiful as well as functional, there is no reason not to do so. I thought his use of newspond was a particularly poor example: it is a perfectly functional website, but happens to be very well designed. As a designer, I obsess over the design, but as a user, I have no trouble getting content out of the site.

I would say that experience, from a user's perspective, is about 40% of what is expected. A good experience, a smooth interface. On the other 60% is the functionality, which is a given.

There is no reason you can't have both, you just need to know _how much_ of each is necessary in your particular application.

(This article reads a little like cannon fodder, as well, but at least it brings up a valid--albeit age-old--discussion.)

On the two extremes - this is quite interesting. One of the key value-adds that we have on Portfolio Executive is simplifying complicated processes. On one our forms we've got the number of required data fields down from 16 to 4, with a few more being presented as required.

To make the form responsive and interactive we're obviously using ajax and js, and we add in some sexy transitions and graphics. i think there are many sites that do similar things where necessary.

in examples like this i think the user interface/experience actually becomes the functionality and so the distinction is difficult.

for me i always do the 'Apple test': can i make it simpler? faster? more obvious?

I just experienced this first hand on my own site, and changed http://www.stitcho.com from a pretty, graphic-laden layout to a sparse, mostly text-based layout. (The old site is shown in the video tours, if you're curious.)

It was hard to delete what I had spent much time on. But when I analyzed the logs and saw that users weren't following a clear path, it was the best decision to make.

In the future, I hope to find a professional to make it pretty AND clear.

I think it is not the beautifulness of the UI that could be distracting. Its the navigation and easily understandable UI. If the user has to click more than 3 clicks to do anything on any UI, user's not gonna stay longer. Example of Google was pretty good. Even now when Google has so many products like Books, Gmail. News etc, users don't get confused as to how to use anything new on Google and that's because of Google's attitude of lesser clicks I suppose. So some website with less clicks, great functionality and a beautiful UI is gonna sell like anything.....

Craigslist is another perfect example. Ugly, and amazingly useful and useable.

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