{"id":203,"date":"2006-03-05T20:11:44","date_gmt":"2006-03-06T01:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/03\/05\/the-merits-of-bad-design\/"},"modified":"2006-03-06T07:29:55","modified_gmt":"2006-03-06T12:29:55","slug":"the-merits-of-bad-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/05\/the-merits-of-bad-design\/","title":{"rendered":"The Merits of Bad Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"400\" vspace=\"4\" hspace=\"4\" height=\"100\" border=\"1\" title=\"Ugly!\" alt=\"Ugly!\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/images\/slash.png?resize=400%2C100\" \/><br \/>\nRobert Scoble wrote about the idea of bad design being better for business <a href=\"http:\/\/scobleizer.wordpress.com\/2006\/03\/04\/the-role-of-anti-marketing-design\/\">here<\/a>, which got me thinking about the sites I visit frequently:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/bloglines.com\">Bloglines<\/a> &#8211; Definitely not a well designed site, but probably the best aggregator online.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/tech.memeorandum.com\/\">tech.memeorandum<\/a> &#8211; Recently re-designed, but still.. not a great looking site.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/google.com\">Google<\/a> &#8211; Not poorly designed by any stretch, but minimalistic to say the least.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/tasktoy.com\">Tasktoy<\/a> &#8211; Not as well known, but indispensable to me. This one won&#8217;t win any design awards anytime soon.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/del.icio.us\">del.icio.us<\/a> &#8211; Again, indispensable and not well designed at all.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/slashdot.org\/\">Slashdot<\/a>  &#8211; Needs no introduction and I don&#8217;t think anyone&#8217;s going to try to defend the design.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/silverfishlongboarding.com\">Silverfish Longboarding<\/a> &#8211; The most successful site I&#8217;ve personally created and let&#8217;s face it, it&#8217;s ugly! It&#8217;s always bothered me how ugly it is, yet it remains the most popular longboarding site online.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macrumors.com\/\">MacRumors<\/a> &#8211; It&#8217;s a Mac site! The Mac site I visit the most is poorly designed! I also read <a href=\"http:\/\/thinksecret.com\/\">ThinkSecret<\/a> quite a bit, the design isn&#8217;t horrible, but it&#8217;s not slick either.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The only well designed sites I visit on a semi-regular basis are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/digg.com\">Digg<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/\">Lifehacker<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/newsvine.com\">Newsvine<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Other non-designed sites include almost every get rich website ever created (and there are a lot and people make money on them), eBay&#8211;it&#8217;s not exactly ugly, but it&#8217;s definitely not going to win any beauty contests any time soon, useit.com &#8211; the number one usability site, Craigslist (as Scoble mentioned) and many others.<\/p>\n<p>Of course there are tons of well designed sites that are successful such as everything by <a href=\"http:\/\/37signals.com\">37Signals<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/flickr.com\">Flickr<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/\">Technorati<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/youtube.com\/\">YouTube<\/a> (arguably) and a million other websites and blogs, but still, the point remans that the sites I visit <em>most<\/em> (and I&#8217;m a web designer) are almost all either under-designed or in some cases, flat out ugly.<\/p>\n<p>What does it mean? I&#8217;m not completely sure, but I definitely think that a few conclusions can be drawn:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Design isn&#8217;t the <em>most<\/em> important aspect of a site.<\/li>\n<li>Functionality beats design.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s something to be said for the &#8220;homemade&#8221; look in terms of building trust.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I don&#8217;t, however, think that bad design makes a site good. I think that what keeps me coming back to all those poorly designed sites is the feeling that there are some extremely smart people behind them who maybe don&#8217;t have time to worry about the design. If they were better designed, I think that if anything, I&#8217;d be more likely to visit them.<\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags start --><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right; font-size: 10px\">Technorati Tags: <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/design\">design<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/web2.0\">web2.0<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/technology\">technology<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Scoble wrote about the idea of bad design being better for business here, which got me thinking about the sites I visit frequently: Bloglines &#8211; Definitely not a well designed site, but probably the best aggregator online. tech.memeorandum &#8211; Recently re-designed, but still.. not a great looking site. Google &#8211; Not poorly designed by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppj2P-3h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}