Ask HN: Crappy website design seems more trustworthy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Crappy website design seems more trustworthy?

23 pointsburglins23 comments

I visited my bank's website and it hit me. For some reason, their crappy website design appears as more trustworthy than other, sleeker designs of modern banks. Why is that?

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I think there is a sweet spot.

Too "modern" and I assume a site is using excessive amounts of tracking and playing other tricks with A/B testing different marketing tactics for services to try to milk their customers for all their worth.

Too crappy and I start to question if the site is actually secure and if they are putting enough money into IT... or if it's even the real site vs some kind of scam.

Both can be problems that erode trust, but they are different problems.

It is possible to have both great content and great design, but it's rare. Think of the Met museum website vs a tech startup. Both will have modern, fancy UIs, but the museum also has real information where the marketing site will only have design elements and simple hype statements.

That said, you probably want to judge your bank's trustworthiness by it's rating with the Federal government, which is public info. Most banks (all but the biggest) have to outsource their online banking software and it's never as slick as the big guys'.

I know that in general, the flashier a thing is -- that is, the more obvious effort that has been put into a thing's aesthetics -- the less likely that thing is to be great.

My hypothesis is it's because time and money investment was put into aesthetics at the expense of making the product or service better.

Is this true in general? I’ve had the opposite experience. I’d love to see some data if you have any.

Whether it's true or not, it's definitely a rule I follow for many situations. If a restaurant has loud signage in a busy area, sometimes literally flashing, it ain't gunna be good. Most new websites try to fill negative space with unsubstantial bullshit

I agree with that example you just shared. I think I don’t view it as the same as your quote though:

> the more obvious effort that has been put into a thing's aesthetics

I would consider that sign example to not be aesthetically pleasing. Maybe it’s more related to the ‘loudness’ of the aesthetics.

There are a lot of simple text blogs on HN which is a great aesthetic, some with lots of thought to keep them simple. Thats the counterpoint IMO.

There's an idiom that describes this; "Putting lipstick on a pig".

If a thing looks and feels great, and has something worth making so, then there's no issue at all.

I have no objective data, only decades of personal experience and observation. It seems true in the majority of cases to me. Enough of a majority that it's a reasonable rule of thumb. The effect is particularly pronounced with websites.

I've even seen it happen in real time with small YouTubers. They get money and start putting it into "production values", then more often than not the quality of their actual substance declines.

Of course, it's not 100%. There are some flashy things that also happen to be decent, and there are nonflashy things that suck. Flashiness is just a general indicator of what the priorities of the maker are.

I think this becomes less the case as good design and aesthetics become table stakes.

They have priorities other than following the latest design fad?

That, and they haven't yet fallen into the trap of giving their marketing department too much say.

We're trained to assume that the prettier things are implemented by entities that care more for the pretty than the function the thing was supposed to preform.

Uglier, less decorated things are expected to function better, with less effort "wasted" on goals unrelated to the problem being solved.

Maybe because it's your bank and you're likely to at least moderately trust the bank you choose? But also, more generally, because it says a lot of things, maybe things you're not conscious of, but it still says them. Off the top of my head:

1) "I manage to survive with this crappy of a design, so I must be doing something else right."

2) "I don't track you all that much. I just get out of the way and let you do stuff."

3) "I don't invest as much time in marketing, I invest time in getting stuff done"

How long have you been using your bank and its website and how satisfied are you with their service such that you are overlaying your lived experience onto your assessment of the trustworthiness that the website projects?

I trust sites that aren't heavy with javascript (less ad tech and so better privacy). In my experience, banks sites are often optimized to run on low end user devices and so make good use of old fashion HTTP requests for managing interactivity.

I have the same thought too.

I think it's because my brain just associated Linear-looking,Tailwind-ish websites with cryptocurrency, rugpull NFT websites. There were certainly a lot of that few years ago.

People are cautious around change, it's comforting if something stays the same. If the bank's website has been the same for 10 years, it must have been working well enough to not need replacing. A new flashy website is unknown and untested.

https://www.lingscars.com/ is a good example of this.

For me it comes down to bugs. Less flashy means less likely to glitch on me, makes me feel safer. Whether or not it's true, I'm not sure.

Move fast and break things is not what I would want from a bank so a bit dated design may signal a healthy conservatism.

"old" vibes, old -> trustworthy, primitive instinct

The bank's trustworthiness doesn't come from their 98 Lighthouse score. It comes from the fact that they have the word "bank" in their name, and people trust banks.

Define “trust banks”

I think "crappy" implies an older, maybe even pre-web 2.0 design. This suggests the site has already been around for a long time, specifically before all the surveillance capitalism and general enshittification trends started. If they didn't update their design since then, that would give some hope that the site still runs more or less unchanged since back then.

This is how I'd explain the impression of trustworthiness. But of course this is only an impression and doesn't tell you anything about how the site actually operates.

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