whoa- i kinda love some of these-
http://mapage.noos.fr/minimiam/go.htm

and all SF crew should check this out-
http://www.lizhickok.com/01city.html

i don't know if this is interesting to anyone else, but i wanted to have a copy of it accessible for myself-

also- digg.com is cool.

and
http://www.jcrows.com/withoutnumbers.html
about an amazonian tribe that doesn't have numbers or colors

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/04/27/internet_security_social_engineering/
i havn't read this yet

http://www.blog.gojobby.com/?p=12

GoJobby Blog
Documenting the Startup Experience of GoJobby.com

Recently there has been a bunch of blog entries centered around the success of “Ugly Design” on the web. The contention (by Robert Scoble, most recently) was that ugly design is more effective.

As a guy with a design background (and as CEO and UI Guy for Jobby), this obviously rubs me the wrong way.

I was recently reading a post on Greg Storey’s blog where he got grumpy about the recent attention given to ugly web sites. The conversation gets pretty lively in the comments (88 comments as I write this). Now, I should preface this whole rant (or sub-rant, really) with my feeling that Greg is a fabulous designer, and smarter than 99.9% of the web designers that I’ve ever met. Let me also preface this by saying that I am as guilty of sacrificing good communication on the alter of good design as the next guy. But, as they say… The first mistake of fixing a problem is admitting that you have one.

Which is why I’m posting this. Most designers (Greg included) seem unwilling to admit that they have a problem.

One of the things that caught my eye in the comments is that Greg responds to Scoble (also present in the comments discussion) by saying “Who the hell said design was pretty? Design is not superficial vanity, it’s better communication.”

This is the response that I’ve heard from most of the designers that I respect… It was the same smug response I threw out the instant I started reading about this stuff. It’s easy to say, and it allows designers to feel like they are in the clear. “I’m an ELITE designer– I never sacrifice usability for design. The stuff *I* do is pretty AND usable”, they say to themselves, and immediately get back to putting cool textures and gradients on their prototype in Photoshop.

But the fact remains, that design and usability do not go hand in hand. In fact, I’d throw out that your usability expert should (if possible) not have any design talent WHATSOEVER (like Jakob Nielsen, Usability Zealot). Designers have too much emotional bias towards pretty things. This seems akin to the rule of having someone on staff who is a dedicated bug tester (who has NOTHING to do with the programming effort).

As you design a web layout, you’re presented with thousands of choices. Colors, fonts, font sizes, header sizes, link styles, etc. The choices made determine the overall usability of the site. For example, web designers (like Greg, for example) nowadays love to style their text links in such a way that they are not underlined. In fact, this blog template does the same darn thing (find me an angel investor and I’ll have time to build a custom blog theme!). Is this a choice fueled by a desire for being pretty or being usable? Given that the eye of a web user finds underlined links more easily, I’d wager it’s the former. Another favorite choice of web designers is making the font of your text small. Small text looks “cooler”, but it’s certainly less readable. It’s particular annoying for me (a user who has his 15″ laptop cranked up to 1920 x 1280), though I am savvy enough to ctrl-+ my way to readability on sites with small text. I could go on and on. The point is, when you put someone who is primarily a designer in charge of your interface, you’re going to get a pretty interface. But, unless he is a designer that is aware of his own biases, he’s going to sacrifice some degree of usability for the sake of his pretty design.

In Greg’s post, he posits that the idea that people reacting negatively to brand “slickness” on the web is silly. He says that it’s unlikely that “people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that’s all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.”

I’m not entirely convinced that people (as a whole) can’t have radically different reactions in different mediums. in his classic book, Ogilvy stated (with lots and lots of data) that text heavy direct mail campaigns were dramatically more effective than “slicks”. He showed that a 2 or 3 page letter on plain paper was hugely more effective than a 4 color, full-bleed brochure. I’m not saying that pretty advertising doesn’t have it’s place. But I do think that the web is a VERY different medium with very different reactions. Jakob Nielsen found that web users responded pretty negatively to web sites whose content wasn’t objective (in his VERY LONG study called “Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web“). In short, he found that web users weren’t real receptive to overt persuasion. And what is pretty design, if it’s not trying to be persuasive?

So, I guess my point is that all of you web designers who (like Greg) feel that good design is effective communication need to put your money where your mouth is… And make your sites a little bit more usable and, yes, a little bit uglier. After a lot of reflection, I know I’m going to with Jobby.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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