
Why I love ugly, messy interfaces - bpierre
https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-and-you-probably-do-too-edff4a896a83
======
mbrock
There's a kind of fetish in design for modernism, futurism, and this kind of
"sleek commercial humanism" (someone coin a better phrase).

The cliché is a self-taught designer in a minimalist loft in some gentrified
inner city, drinking espresso from an expensive vintage machine, obsessively
cleaning their wooden slab desk, listening to post-techno or whatever...

...making designs that look like they signify _design_... with some new or
rediscovered modernist sans serif font... matching pastel colors... tasteful
transitions... high-resolution photographs that signify urban creative
prosumerism...

It's a kind of functional tradition, but as a whiny outsider I'm really
getting sick of it. So I like this article because it's just highlighting that
there are other values to aspire for, not just these matte white ideals of OCD
modernism.

Reminds me of a video from some old RubyConf, I think, after a presentation
about how "beauty corresponds to quality", some humanist in the audience asked
a thoughtful question like "the type of beauty you've explained seems mostly
like a classical or modernist ideal; what about stuff like postmodern notions
of beauty, could that be relevant too?"

(Ruby itself is ugly and messy, a weird mix of Perl and Smalltalk... Hacker
News is ugly and messy... even the interfaces polished to look simple and
clean turn out to be ugly and messy when you look closer, so maybe part of it
is just about honesty.)

~~~
meesterdude
Ruby might be messy, but I disagree entirely that it's ugly. It's one of the
most enjoyable and human programming languages I've ever used, and is what I
work in daily with much enjoyment and satisfaction.

~~~
tomc1985
Agreed, it's still a multiple more expressive than the other languages I use
daily

~~~
erikpukinskis
How do you define expressiveness quantitatively?

~~~
tomc1985
As in, my Ruby code generally has the least amount of implementation cruft
compared to other languages. It would seem that it fits closest to how I
think.

Hashtables, resource locking, regular expressions, string formatting, are all
things I have to deal with a lot and I like dealing with them in Ruby more
than any other language. Also, reflection in Ruby is superb.

------
stared
Maybe it's me, but I consider Craigslist's interface to be clean and minimal -
with no unnecessary stuff (like stock photos, or animations, in the
background). Aesthetic value is not always the priority, from the user's
perspective (heck, I want to rent a room, not - visit an art gallery). Looking
great at the first glance of a non-user is a totally different thing from a
site serving its purpose well for its users.

And exactly for the pursue of the minimalism I went from Delicious to
Pinboard. Cleaner... (OK, plus - working).

Also, it's why I prefer HN looks to Reddit looks. Or even aesthetic looks of
things like Blizzard forum.

~~~
zeemonkee3
Craiglist is already an established player, and its minimalism is part of a
well-known brand.

Suppose you were to pitch a new startup today, at YCombinator or Product Hunt
or a VC meeting, and your web app copies the Craigslist aesthetic. Would you
be taken seriously or laughed out of the room, even if the functionality and
content was top-notch? Would you take that chance?

~~~
sneak
This is pretty much what people do, but with bootstrap.css instead of the
default unstyled Times, is it not?

~~~
jhall1468
Because that gives you _some_ degree of design. There's an enormous difference
between "looks the same" and "looks like 1996". The average end-user has basic
expectations and will very likely leave if those expectations aren't met, at
least until they've already bought in.

~~~
marssaxman
I am _more_ likely to leave if the site looks overdesigned, honestly, because
that is a signal that this company is focused more on the "acquiring customers
and extracting attention" side of the business than on the "providing a useful
service" part I'm actually looking for. If the site looks plain and practical,
it might turn out to be useful; if the site looks gorgeous and cutting-edge,
the company is probably just going to piss me off.

~~~
Retra
If the site is plain, it looks hand-crafted; like somebody who cares about it
made it, and they're too busy making awesome content to fuss about the paint
job.

If the site is "designed", it looks like someone just hired a designer to sell
me something.

------
upofadown
At the airshow, no one ever looks at the F-16 cockpit and says "that is not a
beautiful||fresh||clean||simple||minimal interface". It is understood that the
interface is for use by a highly trained user in an environment where
usability is very important.

Highly usable environments require some sort of training. The amount of self
training that someone will do for something like a web site will entirely
depend on how motivated the user is to achieve the definite result that is the
ultimate goal.

The question then is; do pretty websites cause motivation for further
engagement? I suspect the answer is yes, at least a little, at least for now.
In the future that probably won't be true, people will get tired of anything
anyone can possibly do in terms of appearance and will value usability more.

~~~
stcredzero
_Highly usable environments require some sort of training. The amount of self
training that someone will do for something like a web site will entirely
depend on how motivated the user is to achieve the definite result that is the
ultimate goal._

Is it possible to ramp complexity while ramping motivation? Games seem to do
this quite well.

------
meesterdude
I enjoyed this article, and overall agree - sometimes you want / need a mess.

Craigslist for example is not unbeatable, nor is it a messy interface I think
is truly good. Really, I think it's more a matter of who they are at this
point, and that they have a user base that gets things as are, and they can't
change now. New users will deal with the mess, because they more or less
"have" to use Craiglist for something. Not that craigslist needs to be pretty,
but being frustrating for even regular users is not a good sign.

Photoshop is a better example, I think. Its ugly in the sense that there is a
lot, but whats there IS actually designed; well mostly.

Facebook is trickier. They have a network effect which drives many new users
to overcome on boarding, but also people view it on mobile a lot, and so don't
see that interface. And those that do, probably have blinders and only see the
second column.

Really, I think there is a time, place, product and audience for it. It's
important to think about what information you "bubble up" in an interface, and
what you require them to click-thru for. Obviously if users learn your messy
UI, they're going to be upset with complete redesigns, so don't do that. Do
care about the look of the interface, it always matters, but sometimes
"matters" is pretty, and sometimes "matters" is functional and complete. If
you can strike a balance between the two, and create an experience that your
users can understand and enjoy, you're on the right track.

~~~
jandrese
IMHO, too many designers confuse having lots of controls with "messy
interface". If the controls are poorly laid out then it certainly can be
messy, but if they are organized and arranged properly it is not messy. You
don't say a library is messy because they have a lot of books, those books are
neatly organized and indexed.

People have gone way overboard in hiding functionality in modern design.
Discoverability seems like a dirty word these days. The ironic thing is that
by removing the obvious controls for so many of the features in the name of
simplifying the interface for new users, you actually make the interface more
complex and require more training on the user's part to operate it.

The days of browsing through menus looking for an option that vaguely sounds
like what you want seem to be gone. Now you have to just know the magical
screen gesture to make it do what you want. The only way to discover it is to
know that such a feature already exists and Google for it.

Hey iPhone users, did you know you can swipe up on the lockscreen to bring up
a menu full of useful controls? I'd say roughly 1 in 2 iPhone users I've
talked to know about that feature. Do you know how you were supposed to
discover it? Because I don't.

~~~
meesterdude
> You don't say a library is messy because they have a lot of books, those
> books are neatly organized and indexed.

Well said! I think the same thing about magazines and newspapers. Although we
should not be so quick to compare; part of google's success was their
simplicity, compared to yahoo's complexity.

> The days of browsing through menus looking for an option that vaguely sounds
> like what you want seem to be gone.

Maybe. I'm doing something like this within my app, but for anywhere
complicated I just have a dropdown with a bunch of examples that they can
start out with and tinker with from there. I think that can go a long way in
discoverability and understanding how to do something, and whats possible.

------
ucaetano
Neither Photoshop nor Craigslist are messy. Everything is very well organized,
framed, boxed and so on with a logical hierarchy (which in PS's case can be
collapsed almost entirely to display only a simple interface). It's the very
opposite of messy.

In other words, you want the _simplest_ interface that allows you to do what
you need to do.

~~~
plank
I actually remember some heated discussion on changes of the UI in Photoshop
not that long ago on this forum. So even there (re)design is an issue, and
lovers of the 'little=beautiful' design have their influence.

~~~
harperlee
Blender had an interface that was, to some people, very messy, but other very
experienced, knowledgeable users fought tooth and claw to keep it - and
ultimately lost. The changes were performed, and, after a while, ~everyone was
happy. These kinds of interfaces get some effort to get used to, and
afterwards, you learn to love their quirks and don't want them to change. New
ones get added / moved / removed organically through the life of the software,
so the user and the UI change together. And all of that creates an emotional
attachement.

------
ryanbrunner
For craigslist specifically, I think people often confuse "simple" with
"pretty". Craigslist is a remarkably simple interface. I've never seen anyone
- regardless of age or proficiency with computers - get confused while using
it.

It does what it sets out to do, without pretension or fluff. If that's
considered unsimplistic, I don't know what the word means.

I think the argument is a little different for Photoshop, but I'm not a user
and frankly I do find it confusing. But like the mixer analogy, a professional
tool should sometimes sacrifice simplicity for utility.

~~~
ageektrapped
> I think people often confuse "simple" with "pretty".

Oh man, this.

Even richer is confusing usable with pretty. I guess nowadays people say "user
experience" instead of usability, or the extremely unfortunate: UX.

Simple usually covers the very first prototype version, but then there are
always requests for complicating the feature set so you can't have a simple
interface anymore.

Joel Spolsky had a conference talk about this once (can't remember where I saw
it). There is a tension between simplicity and power: some need simplicity;
others, power. It's a spectrum. What developers and designers should strive
for is elegance so that one can move along the spectrum without noticing it.

------
Kristine1975
Those aren't ugly or messy, they are complex, but functional. These are ugly
messy interfaces:
[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?mode=original](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?mode=original)

Also GIMP.

P.S: The article is missing Blender, as it's a go-to for "ugly, messy
interfaces", even though (after learning the concepts) it's highly usable.

~~~
mrweasel
I was expecting something like this:
[http://www.simplybasicsoftware.com/images/SBPscreenshot2.jpg](http://www.simplybasicsoftware.com/images/SBPscreenshot2.jpg)

I just love those kinds of interface. I don't think I would enjoy using them,
but I love the history that sometimes go with them. Typically they're in-house
apps that just get extended until they do every thing, and only an old guy
named Gary knows how everything works... sort of.

~~~
pavlov
Crazy as those UIs look, there's a certain method to the madness. Colors and
varying shapes help create spatial memory which helps with data entry.

The person who works with this every day knows intuitively that "pink box,
bottom row, second from left" means something specific without having to read
the labels.

If this UI were redesigned in the prevalent iOS 7 style with uniform design
elements, abundant whitespace, very little contrast and lots of text labels in
a light typeface, I think it might actually reduce usability.

------
paulojreis
I think that simplicity still applies, even in interfaces which aren't
considered _simple_.

It's just a matter of how you conceive simplicity. John Maeda talks about
"thoughful reduction". It's not _less_ for the sake of _less_ ; you take away
while it makes sense to take away. That's simplicity. Clutter isn't the
opposite of simplicity. Simplicity has to be conceived always factoring in the
scope of the design. If something is necessary and you remove it, you're not
making your design simpler, just _dumber_ , limited or crippled.

tl;dr: simplicity will look different in different apps. Photoshop will always
look more cluttered than the prospective and portfolio-enriching weather app
which is featured on Dribbble.

------
marinabercea
In my opinion, what's important to some categories of users is high
information density. This is what makes the 'ugly' Craigslist design useful to
its users, the ability to have a bird's-eye view of potential navigation paths
throughout the site because it reduces the number of steps needed to perform
towards a certain goal and makes evaluation easier, without distractions.

------
athenot
There's a difference between interfaces that are messy and those that have
high information density.

Also, there are quite a few sites which benefit (profit) from throwing off the
user's train of thought and injecting unrequested information:

\- Go on Amazon looking for a product and you'll see lots of other products
that may be relevant but that are totally not what you were there for.

\- Facebook being an advertizing company is of course happy to inject promoted
posts to satisfy their clients.

Edward Tufte has written at length[1] about information density, and has shown
that it is possible to design interfaces that contain a huge amount of
information AND yet are clean to the point of being beautiful.

[0]
[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi)

------
mistercow
Pointing at popular products with crappy Ux and implying that their popularity
vindicates their interfaces is totally specious. Does the author honestly
believe that that is how markets work?

Those products all have years of growth and hefty network effects backing them
up. You can infer exactly nothing about the importance of ux based on the
difficulty of unseating them.

------
porter
The reason why these complex products win isn't because of their design, but
instead because they have moats around their business. Craigslist has network
effects and photoshop is an industry standard product. The author is confusing
economics with design. The underlying economics are what make these products
durable, not their complex design.

~~~
RivieraKid
This is the correct answer. You could certainly make a better product
(including betterinterface) but that's not enough to beat Craigslist.

------
kazinator
There is nothing messy or ugly about the Craigslist page.

It is _unadorned_. Unadorned isn't a synonym for ugly.

It is neatly organized into a clear structure which stays consistent and in
which you can easily find everything. Therefore it cannot be called _messy_.

Yes, people love presentations which are neatly organized into a clear
structure. So if you falsely equate that with ugly and messy, then you can
argue that people love ugly and messy.

Suitable word definitions of words make almost any point come true. If not,
you can always bring out the bigger guns, like outright equivocation: shifting
the meanings of words while midway through making the point.

------
amagumori
This sort of recalls some nostalgia i have for my middle school days. this was
pre-Facebook, around the myspace era. And the prevailing thing on the web were
these baroque, meticulously designed websites composed of handcrafted
photoshop work, several kids in my class had designed and built their own
websites and they were incredibly unique, detailed, and interesting to look
at. Idk if anyone remembers this site but there was a site called "spoono.com"
that was basically just an aggregator of these meticulously handmade, pixel
perfect websites.

The most striking thing for me is that during this period the web felt much
more like physical space. I would go to some of these websites just to spend
some time immersed in the atmosphere they had so effectively created with this
old, pixel by pixel style of design.

The biggest effect of html5/css3/social network era for me is that i no longer
give a shit about your website. I might end up on your website if i click a HN
link, but the desire to _be_ on your website, with all the sense of place that
entails, is completely gone.

And all of these websites are completely gone now too, vanished without a
trace. It's like an entire generation of the webs history has been erased.

~~~
Snhr
I'm glad I'm not the only one that realized this. Not that I actively go
around trying to find other people though.

Even bad geocities pages were unique and interesting. I haven't come across
anything that's like that in so long. It seems like an endless cycle of
content aggregators and the usual news website. There's really no reason to
actually explore or any easy way to do it. Might just be me though.

Even myspace allowed you to edit the CSS and pretty much do whatever you
wanted with your personal page. Now all we have is Facebook and the actual
information isn't important at all. I rarely even bother visiting people's
pages nor have I updated mine in so long. It just doesn't matter for the most
part.

------
Kequc
The reasons why Facebook doesn't improve its horrible interface have to do
with incredible technical bloat, and their userbase being stringently
resistant to change. It's the type of person who won't start using something
else until what they have doesn't work at all anymore. I predict an exodus if
they tried to modernise.

Even so much as flattening out some of those beveled edges and gradients would
be enough to throw people off.

"Ugly and messy" doesn't have to be a part of the equation when what you want
is "dense." It's possible to have minimal, clean, dense design. With lots of
buttons and features, beneath a simple UI.

------
onion2k
If the utility of the application provides more value than the pain of the
interface then people will use it because it's worthwhile; in other words
users will put up with the crap if they're getting enough value out of it.

It's worth noting that all of these examples are world-class, industry-leading
applications in their respective domains. People use them _in spite of_ the
interface. If your app hasn't proven itself to be in that class then an ugly,
messy interface isn't going to work.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _If the utility of the application provides more value than the pain of the
> interface then people will use it because it 's worthwhile; in other words
> users will put up with the crap if they're getting enough value out of it._

True in theory, but I don't think this is the case with Photoshop and
Craiglist. Maybe with phpBB though. But in the two mentioned in the article,
any serious attempt on making the interface prettier would most likely kill
the usability. Those products are tools. The interface is there to let you get
the job done quickly and efficiently.

And yes, you may have to spend few minutes learning how to use it. Just like
you have to learn how to use a microwave, or a car.

The current trend of "beautiful and simple" is driven by the market - beause
companies don't care if the product is useful for anything else than getting
you to sign up (and sometimes start paying - startups that aim for an exit
don't even care about that). You can clearly see how little a company cares
about solving their customers' problems by looking at how much they prefer
beauty and simplicity to functionality.

------
brightball
Agree with this completely. Hacker News, Craigslist, Reddit all wildly popular
because they are functional...not pretty. They get you the information you
need and the actions that you can accomplish quickly with no fuss.

Minimalist makes complete sense on mobile and I'd wager that most of what's
driving the "minimalist everything" is responsive layouts.

~~~
wodenokoto
Hacker News is pretty darn minimalistic.

------
bwindels
I agree with the sentiment of the article that aesthetics are often mixed up
with good overall design, whereas good functional UX design is an even more
important part of it IMHO (of which craiglist is an excellent example).

I don't like his usage of the word cluttered though, which implies disorder
and bad UX design for me. An audio mixer or Craighlist are not disordered, but
have quite a lot of order. I guess he means dense interfaces, which can be the
right thing to do for a UX design, if use cases demands it.

------
huskyr
Reminds me of an earlier article on Signal v. Noise on why Drudge Report is
one of the best designed sites on the web:

[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-
is...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-
the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web)

------
js8
A related observation was made by Northcote Parkinson in his famous book
"Parkinson's Law" (not sure which one, there seem to be different versions).
He noted that institutions that have huge clean spaces are essentially dead,
as opposed to institutions which are organic and untidy, which was a sign of
vigorous activity. Maybe that's somewhat true for websites and applications
too..

And I would also point out to Emacs and Vim, which have visually terrible
interfaces, yet some people swear to them.

------
golergka
OK, but what about Photoshop vs Sketch?

And if we're talking about mixers — what about Sonar or Reason vs Ableton?

Simplicity can be applied to professional, feature-rich software too.

~~~
anotheryou
I want to add Cubase. It's not even that cluttered, but was the first program
I encountered, that I could not easily learn by doing.

------
jernfrost
Honestly I think this guy misses the point. A lot of the extreme minimalism we
see today is more about visual aesthetics rather than a clean designed meant
to make an application easy to use.

A messy interface is NOT a good thing. What the author seems to try to imply
is that minimal interfaces means you lack of functionality or capability. That
is a misconception. It is perfectly possible to make complex interfaces with
few features or simple interfaces with lots of features.

You can e.g. simplify a interface by making it easy to combine functionality
and you can complicate it by making lots of overlapping functionality which
can't combine.

Another way to make something complex without adding features is to always
display all possible actions even when they are not relevant for the task you
are presently doing. Clean interfaces strive towards only showing the actions
relevant to what you are presently doing.

------
lukesan
Simplicity is overrated. Experts often need more than the simple mantra 'do
one thing well'. What is often needed for the user (novices and experts) is
clarity. An unambiguous, clear interface is much better than a simple one.
Even a simple interface can be confusing.

------
chriswarbo
The compliments.dk site used as the opening example might be "beautiful", but
the first thing that struck me was the unreadable white text on partially-
white background (e.g. the "products" and "menu" text). That's looks like a
case of misplaced design priorities to me, and is simple enough to "fix" e.g.
with a faint drop-shadow around the text (I say "fix", since it wouldn't help
user agents which don't implement the relevant CSS)

------
jwblackwell
tl;dr "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler" \-
Albert Einstein

~~~
dashoffset
This is so meta.

------
bonaldi
There's no irony in this being posted on Medium, with a clean, beautiful,
simple, elegant design?

Should have done it on one of those tiny-fonted 1998 Blogger templates.

~~~
mbrock
Does anybody really love Medium, though?

~~~
LeoNatan25
I do, and so do many others. Granted, I am just a reader, not a writer.

------
chasing
CraigsList and Facebook are neither ugly nor messy. They're functional given
their needs.

Maybe the thesis of this article should be:

Don't let your designer go berserk and just make whatever white-space-heavy-
drop-shadow-gigantic-photographs-four-words-per-screen mess they feel like if
that's not actually what your users need to find satisfaction in your site or
app.

That's the single right way to do things.

------
roddux
Seem that the author of the article is comparing information dense interfaces
with those that aren't. Not really a fair comparison.

Of course they look 'messier', in as much as there's more on the screen.
People use spreadsheets -- _yes, in 2016!_ \--because they're the best way to
see some types of data, even if the interface is horrid and outmoded.

------
gravypod
I like how you show an mixing board for your example because that industry is
actually getting a small upgrade.

Least I heard Yamaha hired a bunch of people to redo the interface on some of
their higher end equipment. Trust me, they need it. When you need to go to 3
different menus to configure one setting properly then there is a problem.

~~~
mrspeaker
The problem isn't the desk, it was that they put a screen on it to "simplify"
things... unlike the one in the post!

~~~
gravypod
Well no, there are some features that were unthinkable to do in such a small
table top setup as they are in the digital setups.

Some of these are virtual EQ racks, piping audio, and doing some other cool
stuff like eco reduction and speaker sound offsets based on distance from
crowd.

------
Zikes
My favorite chat/messaging interface was Google Talk:
[http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/43000/43041/google-...](http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/43000/43041/google-
talk-07-505x535.png)

Clean, beautiful, minimal. RIP.

------
jonstokes
Here's why I like them: they're like Odysseus's sirens, but for hipster UI
designers. SV is littered with the wrecked hulls of startups that were like,
"we'll just do Craigslist, but with a hip, clean, modern UX. It'll be like
taking candy from a baby!"

------
digi_owl
Ugly is highly subjective.

As for messy, that comes down to it getting in the way of getting something
done.

If something has tools and parts all over, but the workman knows exactly where
everything is and can reach for them as needed, it may look like a mess to an
outsider, but will be efficient in operation to the workman.

------
TrevorJ
I see way too many designs that mistake clean for functional. Apple is a huge
offender in this category lately. They have a terrible habit of hiding
functionality with no hint of how to interact with it.

------
spiderfarmer
Content-wise there is no competition for the examples he came up with. I think
their success should be credited to habit (people are now used to it) and
content, not to their 'ugly' interfaces. I think that new apps / sites like
Uber and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded with Craigslist's aesthetic and that
the iPhone would have flopped if the interface looked like Windows mobile.

And for a personal example, I come to Hacker news for the content and the
community. I do _not_ like the look of it.

------
Puts
I disagree, the Ipod had the best interface ever! It's pure brilliance that
should be held as a school example in UI design.

~~~
dchest
Scroll down, there's "When this is what you really need:" and a mixing
console.

~~~
keithpeter
I'm thinking that two smaller images shown side by side with captions
underneath each would have made the point more crisply. I, too, missed the
carried over point while scrolling down the first time.

------
rsync
Tesla touch screen interface comes to mind...

I don't like it at all ... I just want to reach out and spin a knob.

------
Derpdiherp
Do people use bootstrap for anything more than a landing page? I see what the
author is trying to say - but the kind of design that they're highlighting as
the "new simple. beautiful" interfaces is rarely used for any thing but
something nice to look at before you get into the meat of a product.

~~~
maho
I think the article is still spot on - the "minimal design" frenzy has
influenced more than just bootstrap landing pages.

The YouTube App on my iPad looks wonderful, but for the life of me, I can't
find any back/forward navigation buttons. I suspect they were minimized away
(I'm on iOS7 on my iPad2, this may be different in newer versions).

My Android phone (Cyanogenmod) has a wonderfully minimal interface that even
includes a universal back button - but a "go forward" button was presumably
deemed too messy and either thrown out completely, or hidden so deeply that I
did not manage to find it in a year. This is especially bothersome in the
Android browser...

Yesterday I used a personal Oxygen sensor, for safety reasons. It's a
wonderfully designed piece, with just two buttons. Yet their functions are so
overloaded, there is no way you can use the sensor without studying and
memorizing the user manual.

My Windows PC becomes "simpler and more beautiful" each time the Windows
version number goes up, but always at the cost of useful (but messy-looking)
interfaces. Quick access to wireless network properties? Too messy! Modify the
DDE-commands that the Explorer issues when double-clicking a file? A GUI is
too messy for that, users should just use regedit.exe. The "go up"-button in
Windows Explorer? Why, "go back" should satisfy all our users' needs!

Of course, destuffying messy interfaces is a noble and important cause. But
the degree of mimimalism that current designers seem to strive for is, in my
personal opinion, too radical, and I enjoyed reading a piece that points out
how sometimes, great interfaces must have lots of buttons.

~~~
Derpdiherp
Yeah I can see where you're coming from here, the Android example does
resonate with me. Perhaps I'm not seeing the forefront of this movement
because I'm using Linux so much nowadays - I guess I saw the bootstrap example
and left it there.

It is odd how we're getting more and more screenspace to play with, phone
screens and computer screens are getting larger with higher resolutions
regularly, and yet we're pushing to remove functionality in the name of
simplicity.

------
jordache
rather weak argument from the author.

He conveniently overlooks the fact that many of these sites sporting
minimalist UI, are doing so due to lack of content. They need a natural way to
take up the canvas for a site that is low on content.

------
xiaq
In other words, "make things as simple as possible, but not simpler".

------
jrochkind1
Complex problems need complex UI to do them justice, it's true.

But it doesn't change the fact that complex UI is hard for users to learn.

If users only use your software rarely, instead of daily, they will not be
capable of learning a complex UI.

If users don't know or think of what they are doing as complex or at least
important, they will not be willing to learn a complex UI.

If your software started out with a clean simple UI but added features little
by little, and many/most of your users have been with you all along -- that
was a lot easier to learn, because they learned it little by little, and don't
even realize how complex the thing they learned is.

(This also means if you can hide complexity for beginning users and add it in
little by little, this can help it's learnability. But easier said than done
-- Microsoft Office's attempts to hide 'less used' menu items is an example of
failure that made things worse).

A shopping site with a complicated UI is going to fail miserably -- unless you
manage to make a shopping site that convinces users it really does something
much much better than the competition, and/or a shopping site your users will
use daily.

Photoshop is something users use daily, often as part of their paid job, to do
something the users recognize is fairly complex work and find valuable -- AND
many of it's users have probably been using it since it was simpler and
learning it little by little. Newcomers to photoshop (or gimp), especially
those not using it for a paid job, often find it very difficult to learn and
give up.

Facebook is something users use daily, for something they find indispensable.
It also does an _okay_ job of providing a UI where the users can ignore _most_
of it until they need it (and there are many parts that many users have never
found even if they would be useful). It's also got the network effect lockin
-- a Facebook competitor with a "better" UI would have trouble competing even
if it _did_ manage to come up with a just-as-powerful-but-simpler UI, assuming
that were possible.

Craigslist -- I think actually _is_ a clean/simple interface. Better graphic
design styling probably wouldn't hurt it (I really don't think it would, in
any way, if done well), but it's not complicated.

It's true that powerful functionality is very hard, or sometimes impossible,
to do with a clean simple UI. And powerful functionality is great. But it's
also true, I think, that no matter how powerful your functionality, users are
going to find a complex UI difficult, and they have to have a lot of
motivation to learn it.

For a shopping site someone uses only once or occasionally, I am still
convinced clean simple UI is always going to 'win' (increase sales, get more
sales and users than it's competitors all things being equal, etc).

I am also convinced that you should always _aspire_ to as clean and simple an
interface as possible. If you can get powerful functionality _with_ a clean
interface, users will always like that better than the same func with a
complicated interface. (People _use_ MS Word, but few _like_ it. If someone
could figure out how to provide the same func with a cleaner interface, people
would go wild for it. It's a big 'if', it's not easy). If you can't figure out
how to do that (and it's not easy) -- it is hard to predict whether less
powerful cleaner software or more powerful complex software will 'win' with
the users in any given case, it just depends.

~~~
anotheryou
What really annoys me is the usefulness of ugly color coding. But maybe there
are better palette choices than on the avid keyboard:
[http://www.drted.com/IMG_1225.JPG](http://www.drted.com/IMG_1225.JPG)

------
joesmo
Yes, I love having to hit command/control + F on a site like Craigslist. What
could possibly be a better design than forcing the user to use their find
function because the site is basically unusable otherwise?

------
__m
remembers me of all the directory websites until they got replaced by a simple
search mask.

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tempodox
Meh, overstating the obvious, then making it a sales pitch.

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jrbapna
Agree with this premise, Users will not necessarily appreciate simplicity over
functionality.

It's also worth noting that Facebook, Craigslist, Photoshop, etc are not
necessarily optimizing their UI for new users, but rather those users who have
been using their software for a while. I imagine that one's design
considerations will change based on the prototype of the typical user.

------
edem
I don't feel that this article has a point. For example if you don't like the
ui of Facebook you will still use it because there is no alternative (yet).
There are so many factors at play like lack of alternatives you don't take
into account. I personally think that Craigslist for example is very well
organized. Just because it is not material design it can be good.

~~~
collyw
Sounds like the change from the old Google maps to the new ones where I can't
find anything because it is all hidden away behind unintuitive humburger menus
or something similar. Sure I get maybe 10% more screen space, but I have too
Google how to send a link almost every time these days.

~~~
d0m
Yeah, there are big problems with their UX. I don't think the problem is the
"10% more space" or clean design, just bad decisions for simple UX concepts. I
would expect something to be somewhere logically, but it's not. Or I would
press back and go to a page I've never visited. Or I would want to go
somewhere by walking, but they show me a car icon..?! oh wait, I need to press
the car, then I can change it to walk. Why not show me an icon that say "Go
There" if it's an abstraction for many moving types.

------
robertwalsh0
He picked two examples that came from a time where UX/good graphic design
didn't matter. They are still popular today because of their incumbent status.

I'd wager that neither application would be as popular if they came out today
as our standards have been raised.

Shout out to Basecamp for getting attention for another one of their link-
bait-y, contrarian articles though. They are so good at that and it keeps
their name out there.

