Your Web Design Does NOT Have to Look Good
It's not a popular idea, I know. Many web designers will stop listening at this point, but it's a fact. A beautiful web page isn't necessarily a better one.
Comparative tests have shown that sometimes downright ugly, cheap-looking design can outperform slick. professional design.
Why?
The job of a web page is to facilitate communication, to share information between the page and its visitors.
Attractive design can get in the way of the communication. The design of your page will either support the message you want to share by drawing attention to the message, or it will detract – by drawing attention to itself.
(An underwear model may be very attractive, but that doesn’t mean you want them in charge of a school crossing. That would be counter-productive.)
In addition to communicating the hard information through content, your web design also needs to give the right impression. This is the softer communication – the feel of the page, and the impression of the brand.
Depending on the brand and the personality you want to project, the design of your web sites may vary greatly.
For example, if you want to portray “exclusive craftsmanship”, you’ll want a web design that embodies those values.
But if the site is selling “cheap * discount * sale” – whether it’s shoes, computers, flights or insurance – the web design should reflect those values. In this case, a cheap site that looks like it has not had thousands invested in it may sell MORE than a really classy one.
Remember, you don’t want people to stop and look AT your web design (unless that actually is your goal, i.e. it’s your portfolio). You want them to interact with the information on it.
Design web pages that make interaction easier, before you worry too much about visual appeal.
Here are a few examples for you to check out. Are these websites effective? Do you get the message (right), or do you stop to admire the skill of the designer (wrong)?
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The question I think this raises is does the aesthetic value of a site necessarily mean its well designed? You could argue that if a site is fulfilling its purpose and performing then it must be well designed despite its aesthetic appearance. However I believe good design is inherent to a successful site. For a site to be well designed it does not necessarily need slick graphics and fancy effects, its about connecting to your audience and designing with them in mind. Design should essentially try and portray the core values of the business / individual. Designing for a business that wants to be portrayed as being good value for money is different to being cheap which suggests poor quality. Well designed sites will always succeed over bad ones.
Ryan, I agree completely. Sometimes, a site needs to look cheap, thrown-together, or amateur. If projecting those values will help the target audience to connect with the proposition, a smart designer should find a way to express them.
Hm. This is dodgy territory, and I can see some cracks in your reasoning and even in your understanding of design and its relationship to things “looking good”.
When, for example, I wire-frame, I consider that to be a design. Now if I lay things out correctly, and give the main content the right space, the brand the right amount of precedence when considering all the factors, arrange other content and areas appropriately, put the navigation in an appropriate place etc. etc. then this “looks good” in the grand scheme of the design. It is design that looks good. I haven’t added decoration, or brand consideration, or colours, or styling at this stage. Yet it is design. And yet, in the eye of the designer beyond anything decorative, it “looks good”.
It seems, like many other web designers, you consider design to be purely the part where you make things look pretty and add graphics, decoration and such. This is a small area of what makes a design. A designer isn’t someone that one day found out how to add lens-flare in Photoshop. We aren’t the people that make things look pretty. We aren’t decorators.
Now we come to the word “good”. Urgh. It’s such a subjective word. I think “The Horrors” are a good band, someone else thinks they suck. Let’s remove the subjective of “look good” from your title and replace it with “work”, as this is how a designer would surmise something to be “looking good” in a design process context. See how your new heading falls over? “Your Web Design Does NOT Have to Work”. We’ve replaced “look good” with “work” as – to reiterate – something that “looks good” in a designers eye transcends merely decorative consideration. It looks good because it works based on all the previously planned criteria of the specification and brief.
To comment on some exerts from your post:
“Comparative tests have shown that sometimes downright ugly, cheap-looking design can outperform slick, professional design.”
^ Why should it be that that the design is causing this? This assumption could well be a false positive. Many sites succeed despite themselves. Take Myspace for example. It succeeded because it was one of the first of it’s type; because many of the bands that signed-up got big and the PR of this caused an increase in sign-ups. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have been more successful had it been well designed and coded? I would argue that Facebook may not have ridden into town and snared us all quite so easily had Myspace been better “designed”.
“Attractive design can get in the way of the communication. The design of your page will either support the message you want to share by drawing attention to the message, or it will detract – by drawing attention to itself.”
^ Well then that is bad design. You seem to be saying that attractive design is always decorative and distracting. Attractive design can be minimal and typographical, with elements that draw attention to content. As designers, we aren’t merely “decorators”, we aren’t there to make things look pretty. We are there to correctly present content. And once more you are adding a subjective description into the mix with the word “attractive”.
“In this case, a cheap site that looks like it has not had thousands invested in it may sell MORE than a really classy one.”
^ So let me get this straight. If I’m looking to buy a ball of elastic bands, and the website selling them some how communicates to me a rough comparative cost of how much their website cost to design and develop compared to that of another site selling the same product, I am more likely to to commit to a purchase from the site that looks like it has been “done on the cheap”? I’d like to see your graph of “company looking cheap” to “value of money for product”. By my reckoning, based on this, I should get all my Christmas presents this year from an un-washed thief selling goods in a sewer pipe
“Sometimes, a site needs to look cheap, thrown-together, or amateur.”
^ Urgh. Kill me
Hi Kev. I think we’re in violent agreement. If you read “Save the Pixel”, you’ll see that we’re entirely on the same page. I use “look good” in a purely subjective sense. In the eye of the beholder etc.
It is the case that cheap-looking sites can connote a feeling of cheapness. I might still think it’s great design – as might you.
In the same way, large retailers with budgets in the millions still commission advertisements and point-of-sale promotions in black and red on white that look thrown together. Bad design? Not in my book.
Hm. I’m not sure we are in agreement.
If there are persona out there that think “Oo, this website looks like the people who are offering the product have cut corners and have not been particularly professional in their presentation of it. The product must be cheap, therefore it’s the one for us. Let’s buy it.”
I’d be more inclined to think “We only have £2 and this is the only place that sells the product for £2. We definitely need this product now and no amount of bad presentation and design will deter us from buying it.”
Websites often succeed _despite_ themselves. To attribute success based on a purposefully poor design approach is what’s called a “False Positive”.
If I was very tired and needed to sit down and there was only a rock nearby, I would sit on the rock. I wouldn’t then decide to sit at my desk on a rock each day. The rock was a successful chair in the circumstances of there being nothing else to sit on, and my necessity to need to sit down. At no point did I value the poor design of the rock as a chair as a selling point for me to sit on it.
I love satire
Interesting discussion. I’m inclined to be on Ben’s side when he says that “ugly” design can sometimes match better with a site that offers “cheap” goods or services.
There is a parallel with regular shops that have cheap looking signs saying SALE! on their windows. When you enter the store, you’ll see all the sale items on cheap racks and in large boxes, instead of being displayed in their regular, good looking way.
It can be very functional to create a cheap and amateuristic context (whether online, or in the real world), because the visitor associates the cheap and amateuristic context for example with bargains. And thta’s something we’re all interested in.
It would be nice to see some split testing results on this matter though.
By the way, for a good designer it is rather difficult to create an “ugly” design on purpose, that is a design that not only looks badly decorated, but also has bad layout. Try it, and you’ll be amazed how difficult it is to ignore your well developed sense of creating a “right” layout and composition
Great Article, thanks for this !
Its quite surprising to see how many websites are developed using old traditional methods , for example using tables and inline CSS to construct a page layouts. Usually when you look at the source you almost realise the designer has used a basic WYSIWYG editor such as coffee cup or front-page and probably charged the client a considerable sum of money which gives more experienced designers that sick stomach feeling.
I guess its like any trade , you get good ones and you get very bad ones !
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