Giraffe Forum

I think your article makes a very good point — that usefulness and functionality should be top-of-mind. However, your title is extremely mis-leading. While you may feel that some of the best websites on the web right now that accomplish this are “ugly” — the best website is one that is aesthetically pleasing, useful and functional. There is no relation between ugliness and being more useful and functional.

You are also looking at this out of context — who says that the simple act of “reading” is the number one objective of a web user? Try making everything big text and you now limit the amount of content you can display. If you only work with a use case of one, then you have an tremendously easy job. Take Home Depot for example — there are dozens of legitimate use cases on any give day with a audience that is as vague as they get. You have users that want to know the price of items, the locations or stores, and a list of available products as well as home solutions. Black text on a white background at a large size is going to make this site extremely useful for probably only 10%, while the remaining 90% now has an extremely non-useful experience.

Also, you are looking at websites as a functional utility. Websites are more than that, there is more to them than simple functionality — there are business objectives. Websites are marketing tools and promotional outlets, not online books. How many things in life are less than perfect due to revenue increasing pressures? When you go to an expensive restaurant, the meal would be better if they used more expensive ingredients and hired the most expensive chief in town — the meal would be less expensive if they didn’t decorate the interior or pay their staff or even have a prime downtown location.

Websites are on the hook to accomplish many objectives, serve a wide array of audiences and please many people. You show me your “perfect” website and I will show you at least a hundred businesses that would fail utilizing that “good” design.

I use the RyanAir website, but not because I like it. In fact, I hate it.

The only reason I use the RyanAir website is because it’s the only way I know of to get access to what I want - the cheap airfares that RyanAir offers.

If I could get them through a 3rd party website and not patronise the RyanAir website, I would, in a heartbeat. Even, perhaps, for a small premium.

It’s not that the website is ugly that makes me hate it though, it’s the way that it tries to trick me into paying for stuff I don’t want to pay for - extra baggage, travel insurance. It doesn’t just offer me these things, it is cynically designed to try to trick me into accepting them without even knowing I had an option, and then it makes it extremely difficult to ‘opt-out’ of these extra ’services’ (read - costs, or profits to RyanAir).

Based on the RyanAir premise I’d say that perhaps the argument is more that the value of the product/service you are offering to your customer is more powerful than the design/elegance of your website.

Anyway - rant aside - I do agree that functionality and usefulness are much more important than elegance of design. It is nice to aspire to and achieve both tho’

I disagree with the article. We all agree that content is the king, but a good mix between design and content is the right key. An ugly web site can deter people from reading it. Ryanair is succesfull because it’s cheap and it became popular between students for this reason. The sites your are talking about were and still are teen/young focused. In my opinion if you try to raise up the audience and involve mature users, design counts along with usability.

I’m on the fence with your article. But I certainly disagree with your point about MySpace.

I use MySpace, but it annoys and infuriates me to no end. I can never find what I want. The linking takes a long time to figure out, and it’s just difficult to use. I intially used it because I was looking for some old friends and found them there. If I didn’t have the need/desire to find those old friends, I certainly never would have gone to MySpace in the first place.

So, perhaps there’s an element of necessity that you’re missing here. Necessity/desire trumps design and usability when there are no other alternatives.

I would cringe at some of the overwrought designs that our UI designers would come up with; highly creative but highly distracting to the user who wants to accomplish their task in an easy-to-use manner and then move on. “Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.” Give me efficient functionality over chromey drop-shadow elements any day. It doesn’t have to be ugly to be usable, though. Ugly is off-putting, too. Finding the balance is key, but usability and information design should take precedence over aesthetics.

As Leisa and Margherita mention in the case of Ryanair, I don’t think that the Ryanair website is successful because it is usable and certainly not because the website is ugly! (why would ugliness be a factor in a websites success?). Instead I agree that their are many other stronger factors such as price that are driving the success.

In the case of eBay, MySpace and YouTube, the popularity of these sites is almost certainly driven by having the largest number of members which is adding value to their networks.

In terms of ugliness, this is also a very subjective opinion. I agree that Ryanair is quite repulsive. But on the other hand I don’t have anything against the CL design.

What could be seen as messiness on MySpace profiles by a designer, may be appreciated as an expression of identity for a MySpace member!

The last two sentences of your post this week are now posted prominently on the office walls of my entire web team. A great reminder as we redesign our current site. Thanks so much for your weekly inspiration and clear-headedness.

“The fact is we don’t spend our time looking at websites. We spend our time reading and using them. There are three things a great web design must be: useful, useful and useful.”

Gerry McGovern
New Thinking
July 24, 2007

I think it is all about strategy. What is the objective for a site and who will use it.

Let’s look at our industry. I think that usability companies often take the functionality argument to the extreme, particularly on their own sites.

Who are the main users of their sites?
- Their (potential) customers?

What department in an organisation to they sit under?
- Marketing!

What is one currency for marketers?
- Design!

So why is the creative on so many usability companies sites so poor? Are they trying to scare marketing departments and Agencies away? I don’t think so.

I think I’m pretty much in agreement with Paul Biggins’s comments.

Let’s not confuse pretty colors and cool graphics with “good” design. It seems to me that your perception of good design is putting form before function. Good design allows users to achieve their objectives with the least amount of hassle. Layout and whitespace play a hugely important role. Pleasing aesthetics are just the icing on the cake and must be wielded very carefully.

Craigslist is not ugly at all.
Its layout is so well designed, that you can go to the homepage, understand it very quickly, and get to where you need to go. It doesn’t have pretty colors or graphics because they are not needed. This also makes Craigslist faster to load because there aren’t a bunch of superfluous graphics to download. It is a shining example of a design meeting its objectives: get the user to where they want to go quickly.

I’d also argue that the Google.com homepage is designed pretty well (it could be better in my opinion, but it’s pretty good). Little if nothing stands in the user’s way of doing a search. It doesn’t need to be pretty, so it isn’t - but that does not make it ugly.

I wholeheartedly agree that aesthetically, the RyanAir site is a turd. It’s distracting, and there isn’t enough distinction between the various sections. I’ve never used the site, but I’d imagine that it’s the deals that keep people coming back. I highly doubt that people are thinking “I like this site because it’s confusing and hideous and navigating it is a chore” but rather “I like this site because I get the best deals”

Something similar can be said of MySpace. Its design is terrible, its interface is mediocre at best and its performance is slow slow slow. But people keep going back because all of their peers are there. It’s like hanging out at Denny’s with your friends because your friends are at Denny’s. There might be a 10x better restaurant across the street, but all your friends are at Denny’s.

A lot of the web design community has been moving away from myspace and over to FaceBook. Probably originally because web designers can’t stand looking at myspace. But now it’s because that’s where there peers are.

A web designer’s job is to make using the site easy for the users first and foremost; and then they can worry about aesthetics. Unfortunately there are a significant amount of web designers that just want to showcase their own design skills at the detriment of the user experience.

I’m not sure where you’ve been the last 2 years, but small fonts and poor font color choices are not on the increase.

I hate to use the word “web2.0″ and I hate even more to associate web2.0 with any sort of aesthetic design philosophy (I don’t), but a lot of people do. There are countless articles about “web2.0 design” trends. Almost all of which will mention large fonts. If anything, I think small fonts are on the decrease (please let them be!)

Thanks for your article. I may disagree with you quite a bit, but you’ve succeeded in getting a great conversation started!

This post is slightly off topic - I just wanted to say that I am a subscriber to your email and didn’t realise until today that you had a blog - so I headed straight here and tried to subscribe… why have you buried your RSS buttons at the bottom of the page?? I very nearly didn’t find them.