Ask HN: How important is design? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How important is design?

4 pointsblubbi214 comments

How important is design when you launch a website or an app? I'm not only speaking about UI-design, but also about the "aesthetic factor". It seems to me that design is important, but not a necessity. Of course, design will boost your startup, but is it really important to have a well-designed, beautiful interface or is it good enough to have a clean, usable interface - like HN?

What do you think about this issue?

View on HN

Like jospehpmay mentioned, it really depends on what you're building. Usually I find good design to be an absolute must when breaking into a crowded space (like social networks, email clients, etc). If you're innovating, I think most people will usually care more about the functionality and what problem you're trying to solve rather than how it looks.

I agree with the others but; design should be important in enterprise applications as well. I have seen many enterprise applications which were designed so badly people can't really use them very well. Of course I am not talking about fancy design things, but their usability sometimes... argh. Though they need to cut down money on something, so they focus on the functions instead.

But - if you want to get attraction (like said below) you need to focus on design. You won't look at a Mercedes if it was ugly.

It really depends on what your building. Are you building a B2B application targeting IT departments? Design doesn't matter as long as it's logical and functional. Building a consumer app? In that case, design is much more important.

What about Craigslist? Is Craigslist a special case?

I think Craigslist is a special case because it's in a chicken-and-egg market. I personally hate using Craigslist because of their poor design, though I've heard rumblings that they're going to change that.

I like the Craigslist design. It is simple and easy to use.

Craigslist is the only exception I know of.

... and hacker news apparently :-)

how about reddit?

You need to distinguish design as an aesthetic from functional design.From a functional point of view reddit is a well designed site.In an ideal world of course they would be congruent but which is more important to get right first depends on what field you are in and who your customers are.

Don't confuse simplicity with poor design. Or, to rephrase that as a question: what aspect(s) of Reddit do you feel are poorly designed?

How is Reddit simple? By my count they have 40+ navigational buttons on the main pages and each story has 6 buttons (in one form or another) [1]. Reddit absolutely overwhelms me with places to click and gives me no sense of it being nicely organized (as opposed to Craigslist which I think feels very orderly). Amazon feels a lot like reddit to me, but I mostly only need to use Amazon's search bar, so it's ok.

1. http://imgur.com/wVO2JUI

Reddit is certainly not a design with simplicity in mind. The sheer amount of links and navigation in general is completely overwhelming. I'd say it's rather a poor design.

Design = attraction

Development = personality

You need to be attracted to someone before you're willing to get to know their personality

Reply on news.ycombinator.com