Humble Beginnings
blog.alexmaccaw.com
blog.alexmaccaw.com
Its a lot about signaling, I think. People want to know that they aren't wasting their time. If a website is ugly and poorly designed, then its easy to think "Whoever made this didn't put a lot of effort into it, and may continue to not put effort into it." In the old days of the web, just being on the web was signal enough that you put a fair amount of effort into your project. Now, we have more sophisticated methods of signaling that our websites are better than others. However, its a bit like clothing and jewelry in that it can be superficial -- just because something is dressed up and pretty on the outside doesn't always mean theres something worthwhile underneath.
Humorously, the Github repo title of my product contains the very words "Humble Beginnings". We're launching this week, right Justin? ;)
Also the tools are so much easier. I remember setting up wordpress about 6 years ago and compared to today it is so much easier to set up and also so much easier and cheaper to make it look nice too!
Useful will still trump pretty, 9 times out of 10. Especially for a down-and-dirty, early-stage site or service. Think about CraigsList: the site looks like it could conceivably have existed on text-based interfaces in the early 1980s. And that simplicity is part of its ease of use.
I'm not suggesting good design doesn't matter. But pretty, for pretty's sake, is overrated. The primary goal of design is to entice people to use something, and to make using it as easy and rewarding as possible. Often, this means making something as minimalist as possible. Depending on your targeted early adopters, they may be willing to overlook an ugly site if they derive a lot of value from using it.
In a weird way, I almost have the opposite gut reaction to yours when I encounter an early-stage service. If it's too slick and professional looking, I start wondering where the dollars are being spent, and where the priorities are. Especially if the startup is pre-funded or bootstrapped. Champagne tastes on beer budgets are often harbingers of doom.
As a corollary, I will say that people seem a lot more forgiving of ugliness if the service is very novel. The more new-to-the-world your product or service is, the more people will put up with its warts and irregularities (at least in the beginning). Conversely, if your product is attemting to outcompete an established competitor, design becomes a fairly big priority: not graphic design, per se, so much as UX design (think: the simplicity of Google vs. the complexity of Yahoo).
Sometimes people do point and say that most web 2.0 websites look similar and uninspired, but I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing.
Indeed, the bar is raised. When confronted with multiple choices, I'll pick the nicely designed and engineered (that's a bit hard to assess from the beginning)
The bar now is getting too high that start-ups are becoming expensive again.
These days when I see something like Pinboard's front page it's kind of a shock. I couldn't possibly bring myself to pay for something so ugly.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990828014913/http://www.amazon....?
But it seems to me that the hardest thing is getting users to use your product or service (especially repeatedly). In a sense, it's more of a behavioral/psychological problem.
Ideas are bad because they don't get users. The best design won't turn a bad idea into a good one.
The thing I find most interesting about these examples is that all of them (I believe) had a dedicated user base -- as well as fast growing one -- in the beginning.
People really wanted to use them from day one.
Just sayin', it wasn't that bad.
Design is what really set them apart from MySpace. That, and semi-private college communities.