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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get the idea beauty has terrible ROI?

Look at almost any premium product and the premium that is being paid for is in the beauty. Rarely is it in the actual quality of the product.

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If you’re selling a premium produce, then beauty can be justified by the premium price. But us should never be more important than the functionality. Never.

Even a Rolls Royce is a vehicle (and a damned fine one to boot) before it’s an art piece.

Depends what product. A toaster has very similar functionality to its competitors, so it needs to attract buyers with style and design elements.

When functionality is a given like it is for a kitchen toaster, we can argue the presentation and style is more important.

Most toasters are shit so there is definitely room to compete on functionality - it's just harder to convey that to buyers than a pretty design.

In B2C aesthetics are important. In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

SAP (everything), Workday (HR), Service Now (help desk), Archer (compliance), SailPoint (compliance), and other applications that have been inflicted on my miserable existence over the last 25 years of corporate IT; all B2B enterprise applications that I guarantee did not consider either speed or ease of use to be remotely important.

Your pain only proves my point. You know it is supposed to be better, regardless of how it looks. There are outliers who neglect the end users, usually because they are too big or well connected to be replaced.

I don't know if it actually does, maybe in theory, we would assume these companies would be incentivized to optimize for speed and experience but you can't use "the exception that proves the rule" when the majority would fall into the exception category. There have been countless diatribes about how in B2B the purchaser is not the user, so speed, user experience, and functionality are all at best second order priorities. The apps I name checked above all probably provide the base level required amount of functionality that covers the needs of a lot of large privately held and all publicly held US companies, they are looking for the corp equivalent of Wal-Mart shoppers not Nordstrom shoppers (this dove tails into penny wise/pound foolish quarterly earning mindset, corporate America is dumb AF.)

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