Oct 03 2006 at 3:14pm
The “bad design is good design” debate
I’m a little late to the party but the discussion is still going on. You can read that post to find out more about the history of this topic. The basic question is this: why do badly designed sites do so well? Examples usually cited include mySpace, Craigslist, and eBay. Ok/Cancel has a good cartoon that pretty much sums it up.
I partially agree with some of the other propositions: that these sites succeed despite their bad design, that bad design is perceived as being more trustworthy in some cases, and that design is about more than just visual appearance. I definitely do not agree that ugly sites are more usable.
My proposition is that design needs to be appropriate: appropriate for the audience, for the business, and for what the site is trying to accomplish. We can compare this to the offline world, where the design of shops and restaurants is tied directly to the type and quality of products they are selling.
When you walk into a store like WalMart the design immediately tells you a lot about the products and service available. The store is gigantic and lit with glaring fluorescent bulbs. The shelves are made of ugly, durable metal and are stacked high with products. The sparesley placed employees are wearing identical blue vests covered with corny buttons. The happy face logo is everywhere. You know exactly what you’re going to find before you even get past the entry way: mass produced, lower quality products at rock bottom prices.
Or how about restaurants? Lets say you walk into a very fancy looking restaurant. There are high quality table cloths, cloth napkins and wine glasses on every table. The maitre’d is wearing a tuxedo. The ambience is quiet and elegant. You’d be pretty shocked if the menu was stocked with low cost burgers and pizza.
The design of a shop or restaurant creates an expectation from the user. The design leads them to make certain assumptions about what will happen next. How does this relate to web design? If you’re selling a product for a discount price, you probably don’t want a elegant and expensive looking design. That might make users suspicious. How can this be so beautiful and yet the products are so cheap? There must be something wrong here… Yet this what most designers would refer to as “good design.” In this case, a good design might be something that looks a little cheap. On the other hand, if you’re trying to sell a good quality, more expensive product, you need to have a high quality design. Everything has to come together to create your brand - including the goodness/badness of the design of your website.
Lets translate this to the social media scene. MySpace is a place for friends to hang out. If you were a teenager going to hang out at a new friend’s place, you’d expect her room to look a certain way, right? It will probably contain a mish mash of different things: posters of celebrities on the wall, an unmade bed with funky pillows, the odd stuffed animals left over from childhood. It would be pretty weird if it had a perfect colour scheme with elegant curtains and a matching bedspread.
On the other hand, if you were a young adult visiting your friend’s apartment in the city you’d expect it to look a little different. It might be a little more designed. This is why other social networking sites can be more attractive to different audiences. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it in terms of class, but I would say that it has a lot to do with the characteristics of your target audience. I think one of the reasons why myspace eclipsed friendster so quickly is because of the design - friendster was boring. Nobody wants to hang out in a room with blank white walls and drab blue-grey furniture.
Craigslist is boring too, so why does it do so well? Well, firstly, it’s not a social networking site. It’s not comparable to hanging out at someone’s house. It’s more comparable to a garage sale. At a garage sale, you just need the basics. In fact, you’d probably be suspicious if someone had fancy display tables and uniformed staff at a garage sale. Others have said that the un-designed look makes it clear that this is not a corporate site. I agree, although I think some design would have worked there instead of no design at all.
One thing that must be noted is that some of these sites were designed many years ago and just haven’t changed. eBay and IMDB are two examples. Those sites were designed back in the 90’s. At that time, their designs were pretty good. Now? Not so much, but both of those sites are so entrenched as the leaders in their respecitve markets that they have no reason to update the design.
