

Experience vs. Function — a Beautiful UI is Not Always the Best UI - marketer
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/10/13/experience-vs-function-beautiful-ui-not-always-best-ui/

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mikeryan
Crappy post. The cream of any UI crop is able to combine both pretty and
usable. The line "The interface is too beautiful, there’s too much of it -
it’s distracting because you cannot easily focus on the news stories" is
bullshit and I know so every time I use my iPhone.

If there's a problem with the newspond interface then its not usable enough -
not too good looking.

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ericwaller
That's the point of the post: the newspond interface sacrifices usability for
beauty.

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jacobolus
No. The newspond interface is an ugly interface because "beauty" in design is
about understanding the content. Newspond's creator shows no understanding of
information design.

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ericwaller
That may be your understanding of "beauty," but it's not the author's.

It's not worth arguing semantics, substitute "prettiness" if it makes you feel
better.

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jacobolus
It’s not “pretty” either. Perhaps “gaudy” or “пошлость” (Russian for
“pretentious banality”) is the word you’re looking for? (Edward Tufte has a
graphic: <http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg> )

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endtwist
While I agree with what the general gist of the article entails, don't let the
UI get in the way, I don't particularly agree with all of the specifics.

My main problem with this article is the fact that the author pits
"experience" against "function," and thereby separates the two into different
camps. He doesn't have any in-between, wherein there would be a balance of
experience _and_ function; instead, he focuses only on the two extremes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with a very
functional website. I'm a fan of minimal (functional) design, but at the same
time, if you're able to make a site beautiful as well as functional, there is
no reason not to do so. I thought his use of newspond was a particularly poor
example: it is a perfectly functional website, but happens to be very well
designed. As a designer, I obsess over the design, but as a user, I have no
trouble getting content out of the site.

I would say that experience, from a user's perspective, is about 40% of what
is expected. A good experience, a smooth interface. On the other 60% is the
functionality, which is a given.

There is no reason you can't have both, you just need to know _how much_ of
each is necessary in your particular application.

(This article reads a little like cannon fodder, as well, but at least it
brings up a valid--albeit age-old--discussion.)

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portfolioexec
On the two extremes - this is quite interesting. One of the key value-adds
that we have on Portfolio Executive is simplifying complicated processes. On
one our forms we've got the number of required data fields down from 16 to 4,
with a few more being presented as required.

To make the form responsive and interactive we're obviously using ajax and js,
and we add in some sexy transitions and graphics. i think there are many sites
that do similar things where necessary.

in examples like this i think the user interface/experience actually becomes
the functionality and so the distinction is difficult.

for me i always do the 'Apple test': can i make it simpler? faster? more
obvious?

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RKlophaus
I just experienced this first hand on my own site, and changed
<http://www.stitcho.com> from a pretty, graphic-laden layout to a sparse,
mostly text-based layout. (The old site is shown in the video tours, if you're
curious.)

It was hard to delete what I had spent much time on. But when I analyzed the
logs and saw that users weren't following a clear path, it was the best
decision to make.

In the future, I hope to find a professional to make it pretty AND clear.

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vparihar
I think it is not the beautifulness of the UI that could be distracting. Its
the navigation and easily understandable UI. If the user has to click more
than 3 clicks to do anything on any UI, user's not gonna stay longer. Example
of Google was pretty good. Even now when Google has so many products like
Books, Gmail. News etc, users don't get confused as to how to use anything new
on Google and that's because of Google's attitude of lesser clicks I suppose.
So some website with less clicks, great functionality and a beautiful UI is
gonna sell like anything.....

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quickpost
Craigslist is another perfect example. Ugly, and amazingly useful and useable.

