But that's not "usability", it's style. Is style impotant? Yes. But it's entirely possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your ideas about "ugly" are the same as other peoples'.
The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly, frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.
I agree that it's possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. But it entirely depends on how that software is being used.
In the case of a web site, Jakob says it well (from the same article I linked above):
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for
survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave.
If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company
offers and what users can do on the site, people leave.
If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a
website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer
users' key questions, they leave.
I would add: if the site is ugly, people leave.
Your web site might be "eminently usable", but if people don't read it, it's a failure.
No, style and aesthetics are intrinsically tied to usability and studies have shown this again and again. Check out Malcom Gladwell's Blink for a few colloquial examples. For more formal research studies, email me.
The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly, frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.