

UI: nice look vs distinctiveness and branding - Facens

I've been designing web interfaces for the last ten years, and now that I'm working on my own startup, I face critical UI decisions.
I spent the last hour bouncing here and there on dribbble, pointing the eyes on beautiful examples of UI design. What I see, anyway, is an incredible similarity of styles. There is a dominant, yet beautiful, way to design user interfaces and components, but it terribly lacks distinctiveness.
What recently happened with Twitter for Mac and the mail client Sparrow is iconic of what I mean: user interfaces are becoming incredibly similar to each other.
This is probably good for users, because similar UIs means a shorter learning curve. But is it good for branding?<p>When I surf websites like dribbble, I feel this terrible temptation of approving myself to the dominant mass, but than I think: what about branding?
Branding is all about distinctiveness, and distinctiveness in UI has a key role in influencing brand awareness, particularly when talking about websites.
When I look at web apps like mint.com, posterous or even Facebook, I see great examples of designs with a brand behind, with a great ability of being recognizable.<p>What I ask myself, then, is if a less nice-looking and more distinctive UI design is what I should focus on. I know, I know what's in your mind now: nice look and distinctiveness can simply live together, this is obviously true. But the real question is: what to sacrifice? What to focus on?
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petervandijck
I wish people would distinguish more between the "visual" side of UI and the
"UX" side of UI. The question and discussion conflate them. And then they
confuse the whole thing with branding.

Branding is NOT about distinctiveness in visual design. Branding is about
owning a particular position in the users' mind. ie. "The cheapest"
(Wallmart). Or "the original" (Coca Cola). Or "Search" (Google). Or
"Classifieds" (Craigslist).

The purpose of visual design, particularly on the web, is to communicate well
and make your site easy to use. I don't believe it is to "stand out", although
that can be a nice-to-have.

If you want to study the relation between visual design and branding, study
Craigslist, eBay, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. Dropbox too.

On the web, the reason why most sites look the same is that we've found again
and again that usability trumps "looks", since the browser is so limited. So
sites have converged on a whole bunch of conventions. (I'm talking about the
ux side of design).

Having said all that, I think it's totally ok to not follow the pack in terms
of gradients and dropshadows etc.

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sagacity
Here is my take on your scenario:

Think about your potential user Joe, when he first hits your home page, with
distinctive UI.

Will he think 'Oh... this looks cool! Let me mess with this, even though I'm
not really sure how this is going to work' ?

Probably not, unless you have a _really_ compelling value proposition to offer
that would be _instantly_ obvious to him. If your site _does_ have such
characteristics, go ahead and 'roll your own', by all means.

Otherwise, I'd suggest you go with a commonly prevailing/understood/acceptable
design/UI to begin with, as it should facilitate higher rates of user
acquisition (i.e. conversion) in relatively shorter time-frames.

There's nothing to stop you from re-branding (gently, gradually?) once you
have achieved critical mass or a sizeable user base.

HTH

[Not really a designer here, but someone (who likes to think of myself as)
having a good eye for designs/branding and UI engineering, with a good bit of
experience at _getting_ such things done.]

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souldoubt
Focus on solving the problem. Ignore distinctiveness. To quote Paul Rand:

"Don't try to be original. Just try to be good."

<http://www.logodesignlove.com/paul-rand-video>

Design (especially UI) is an exercise in solving problems and designers often
arrive at similar solutions. That's OK. What matters is whether the user gets
what s/he needs, not whether the UI is memorable. Indeed, the less computer
administrative debris, the better. I design for a living and the best success
I've had is when the UI gets out of the way of the content and task.

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goldmab
Good observation. There is definitely a now-ish style in web design. Rich
backgrounds, rounded corners, soft gradients, big fonts, and of course those
text shadows.

There's even a style of writing on web sites now, especially startups. Very
direct with short bold sentences. "BubbleDrubber connects YOU with Bubbles you
Drub. None of the Flub!"

I think you should be more distinctive than that wherever you can. There are
different kinds of nice that you just haven't thought of yet.

------
sullof
Before that a developer, I am a song-writer. When you write a song, you start
listening a lot of music. After, you put all that music in a side of your
brain and forget it. After, you sing and sing untill you sing something
totally different.

~~~
folletto
Yes. Yes. And I can say that this happens in every field. Check this small
interview to Erik Spiekermann about typography:
[http://intenseminimalism.com/2011/everybody-is-influenced-
by...](http://intenseminimalism.com/2011/everybody-is-influenced-by-somebody-
else-erik-spiekermann/)

------
bmelton
My take on this, which generally isn't shared by most, is that the 'pre-fab'
design techniques you see are absolutely gold when you're starting out.

Short sentences to communicate your mission/purpose. Spartan designs that
focus on diving in and easing the call to action as much as possible. Big
fonts, soft gradients. These are the tools of the 'pre-fab' layout.

When you're starting out, I firmly believe that you should ship first, and
more importantly, that you only have, at best, a 'good idea' of how users are
going to interact with your application.

As you get more users and get more feedback, then your UI/UX needs to evolve
to meet with common use cases, or to cover use cases you hadn't thought of, or
to keep up with demand. I strongly believe that you can't predict this going
in, unless you have already built a very similar product for a very similar
demographic, or unless you already have existing users.

You're 100% right in that the pre-fab design ideals don't leave much room for
branding, but there definitely IS room for branding. Of the sites using these
common design patterns, there are definitely ones that stick out moreso than
others, due to superior branding. You can use the space that's left to
reinforce brand without beating somebody over the head with it, and more
importantly, without breaking ease of use.

In my humble opinion, THAT is the real challenge.

~~~
Facens
When a web project is in the early days, a maintainable design is important,
because it reduces the cost of change. Reading the comments to my post, I've
seen a big mistake: good design is always good design, when you talk about
putting the things where they should be. Effectiveness is always the first
element to focus on, no doubts. What I was pointing your attention on, anyway,
is how a certain kind of 'dominant design' is making many websites look
'flat'.

I also think that some of this design habits also point in the wrong
direction. Just to explain better, I'd say that Drew Wilson is iconic of this.
He's quite popular, and you can see some of his work here:
<http://dribbble.com/drewwilson/> He uses a mac-like style for web
applications, and I think this is a huge mistake. Try to visit
<http://builditwith.me/>: it's surely beautiful, but do you think it's
'usable'? I think it's not. But the most, I think it has no distinctiveness.
Here there's another mistake: distinctiveness does not mean originality. My
examples where websites like mint.com or posterous, or even Dropbox. These
website can't be called that original, but they surely have a distinctive
design, made of key and recognizable colors, way to use (or not) gradients,
etc.

In my humble opinion, any design must obviously respect some key principles,
like effectiveness or usability. But I also think that any design should point
on 'identity', especially when building a web app, something most designers
don't seem to care about.

~~~
folletto
I think that Buildwithme is instead an excellent website, with a good
usability and it's one of the few websites that tries to break the taboo of
"making an app of a webapp". And I think it delivers pretty well. Of course,
it's not possible with all the webapps (and not suggested).

On the other side, I think it's a very different problem, and I'd advise to
not mix things up: there's style, there's identity, there are UI canons.

Bultwithme for example mixes web+mac UI canons, has a mac style and doesn't
work a lot on identity.

Take Nike.com to have another example. It uses a web style, a bit toward the
app format, with UI canons that are almost everywhere app-like... but it has a
very strong identity.

On the other side, take Lightroom. It's obviously an app and uses desktop UI
canon... but it has a definite identity that you can't mix up with anything
else.

Also dropbox, as you cited, uses a quite standard web style and web UI canon,
but it has a strong identity.

Don't reduce the identity to the UI canons or interaction styles: they are
very different things. ;)

