

Ask HN: does design matter? - evancaine

There are plenty of opinions to be found on google.   Most of those who say design matters are designers themselves.  Most of those who say it doesn't matter are people profiling other "ugly" sites (plentyoffish, craigslist etc)<p>I think there's a difference between UX, UI and design (with large amounts of overlap).  UX is the broad overall experience, UI is more specific as is concerned with how the site is used to complete various tasks and design is how it looks.<p>I'd like to hear from entrepreneurs who have launched their own successful sites.  Does design matter?
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michaelpinto
Sites like craigslist are in fact well designed, it's just that those sites
feature a very minimal design (less = more). In fact if you want an example of
a site that veered to encourage bad design MySpace is a good example. But even
there you could argue that it was a well designed site because the audience
for that site wanted their pages to be ugly and hard to read.

I think you'll find that really good design (and designers) always think of
their audience first. This isn't just a design mindset, but a marketing one.
That thinking is essential to creating any good product from a website to a
cooking wok.

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maxdemarzi
I think it matters. Wasn't one of the reasons MySpace lost vs Facebook the
fact that users could edit their page to look like a vomit smoothie on MySpace
but things were kept clean and uniform on Facebook?

Regardless I think it matters. There have been a few threads on here about how
developers can't design for crap, and engineer developed sites look ugly. So I
give up. I'm going to finish coding my project, then pay some design firm to
make my ugly baby pretty and launch.

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notahacker
Successful sites that are poorly designed are outliers - early movers in big
movers. It's not quite true to say that they succeed in spite of their design
(a clean-looking, more usable Plentyoffish would get fewer ad clicks) but if
you're competing with them then a great UX is going to put you at less of a
disadvantage when it comes to attracting and retaining visitors, because the
concept of dating sites being free isn't a new one.

Likewise, if you're Amazon you can afford to send users contemplating buying
away from your website with sponsored links because they will most likely come
back to your big name site to complete the purchase. If you're not Amazon you
probably don't want any distractions for the users not geared towards upsell.

To some extent their designs are stuck in a local maximum because their
relative ugliness is part of their brand: if Craigslist tidied up their design
they'd probably see a big rise in bounces from people confused by being sent
to listings that _don't look like Craigslist_.

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humj
I think what you're talking about is graphics rather than design. To me,
design is the umbrella term encompassing UX, UI and graphics. so I'll rephrase
the question: Do graphics matter?

While it may not the biggest part of design, graphics still do matter. "The
way things look" plays a big role in how your eyes move through the space of
your product, where your attention goes, and ultimately, where someone decides
they've had enough and are ready to leave. Basic Examples: is the call-to-
action button colored in a way that I can spot it instantly? Is the text
readable enough that I'm not fatigued after a few posts?

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triviatise
design definitely matters. There is the emotional part of design - does it
evoke the right emotions just by the way it looks. Then there is the usability
part of design. Usability is all about speed

There are other areas, but these are the key ones:

1) learnability -how fast can a first time (new) user figure out how to
accomplish the primary tasks 2) efficiency - how fast can a repeat user
accomplish the primary tasks 3) memorability - how fast can a user regain
proficiency after a period of time

Core to this is understanding the primary tasks. Design is absolutely critical
when you think about the essence of it as speed

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jakkinabox
HN seems to be popular enough even though it serves up link expired things way
too often. Does that count as a UX problem?

Digg and Gawker are good examples of driving users away with bad design.

