Joyent

More on the "Non-Design" Movement

Google isn’t the only poster child for the “non-design” movement; other sites frequently mentioned by non-design afficionados are eBay and Craigslist. The idea and basic logic here being, more or less:

These sites feature no fancy graphic design or highly-polished manipulative branding; yet they are both wildly popular and financially successful; ergo, the success of these sites is due, at least in part, to the fact that their graphic design is actually rather crummy.

Cf. this rather widely-linked post from Robert Scoble last month, “The role of anti-marketing design”, wherein he champions Markus Frind, founder of the rather unsavory dating site PlentyOfFish. The hook being that PlentyOfFish is, according to Frind, earning more than $10,000 per day from Google AdSense:

Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Even assuming Frind’s revenue figures are true, the speciousness here about what is “well known” regarding ugly web design is so thick you can choke on it. Sure, there are a few high-flying sites that are at least somewhat ugly, but the existence of a few example cases does not constitute a proof.

How is it not just as likely, if not more so, that sites like Google, eBay, and MySpace have succeeded despite their design, rather than because of it? I can count these ugly-but-spectacularly-successful sites on my fingers, but there are thousands and thousands of ugly web sites languishing in obscurity.

Isn’t the more obvious explanation that the key to all of these sites’ success is that each was the first to market with a good implementation of a good idea?

Is good graphic design required for a web site to succeed? No, of course not. But no one is claiming it is, any more than they’re claiming that you need to have a good domain name, or produce good HTML markup, or generate nice clean URLs for your pages.

I don’t see anyone arguing that Amazon’s success proves that ugly URLs are better than clean ones, or that Technorati’s popularity is proof that slow sites are better than fast ones, but that’s the same “pick one example supporting your case” logic behind these arguments regarding the supposed superiority of inferior graphic design.

A few others countering this notion:

Greg Storey:

I’m tired of this nonsense that suggests a “”non-designed site will be more successful because people are sensitive to using applications that aren’t under the thumb of the man. Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that’s all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.

OK/Cancel (after sneaking in a nice dig at Jakob Nielsen):

Now, in the peculiar case of these “ugly” websites, a different sort of mechanism is at work. In most cases, the winners of the web these days are sites that are able to draw and sustain vibrant communities and/or solicit interesting user-generated content. Whether it’s Craigslist, or MySpace or IMDB, by being the first in the space they were able to capture the community and the net result was that early success lead to later success.

Andy Rutledge:

The fact that Google’s website is unremarkable and poorly laid out is ancillary to these facts, mostly because the main interface is very simple. Poorly designed “simple” is far easier to swallow than poorly designed “complex.” It works okay in spite of the bad layout and un-design. The fact is Google got it right where so many fail. They built their reputation on substance rather than on style. They’re not important because of their style, but because of execution. They don’t have to look important because they simply are important.

And, my favorite, this quick-hit blurb from Jason Santa Maria:

Good, keep designing shitty looking sites, it makes it that much easier for designers to get work. Simple, “un-designed”, and uncluttered are not synonymous, and it doesn’t ever have to be one or the other.