Hungry? Want another bullshit sandwich?
There has been too much nonsense spouted about the effectiveness of certain successful companies’ websites and it’s time to correct it. Those who say that poorly designed websites are partly responsible for some companies’ success are feeding you a load of crap. And too many of you are eating it up.
Stop it. Bad design harms business, it does not help it. Websites like Boingboing, Google and eBay are successful in spite of their poorly designed sites, not because of them. What kills me is that I continue to see designers, some of them professionals, buying into this drivel and helping to perpetuate it. This whole business of contemplating the elusive wisdom of bad design and ugly layout is amateur hour on parade. It’s time to call bullshit.
This is commercial success we’re talking about, boys and girls. In commerce, if your product sucks, you suck.
Commercial success plus bad design does NOT equal good design. The reason Google is the premier search tool is because it works. It is the most comprehensive and best-respected search tool for most Web users. It’s well managed, a business leader rather than follower and it has been around for quite a while. Google is a mover and shaker, constantly finding and providing tools, solutions and applications for everyday people to use online. The Google brand has gravity, respect and delivers tangible results every minute of the day. THAT’S why Google is the search engine of choice.
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.
This is commercial success we’re talking about, boys and girls. In commerce, if your product sucks, you suck.
Most companies put the cart before the horse and try to build their success on how cool their company culture is or how awesomely awesome their logo is. Google’s logo pretty much sucks. So what? They can buy and sell any company that has a cool logo any day of the week; not because of their awful main interface layout, but in spite of it.
All of these companies that have suckass website designs and layouts but are successful anyway did the same thing. eBay was best at what it does before anyone else was that good. They’ve locked up the category with execution first, not style. Boingboing is one of the best-known and most popular weblogs because everybody loves to go there to hate on the Bush administration. The design sucks, but the content and advertising always bashes the readers’ #1 enemy. Substance, not style.
This is commercial success we’re talking about, boys and girls. In commerce, if your product sucks, you suck. It won’t matter how awesome your website looks, you will fail if your product is not up to snuff. By the same token, you are allowed to look like a dog if your product is the cat’s meow. Think about it; the successful businessperson will always have a hot date to the dinner party. We’re talking about human behavior here, folks.
But let’s not be too smart by half. Craigslist, for instance, is a clear winner with an un-design, but it’s not an example of bad design. The site content is nothing but relevant text links, and rightly so! The “design” it uses is well-suited to the type of content, so it is quite effective. This site is not like eBay or Google, as it succeeds because of the design rather than spite of it. Google and eBay have layout components and content that were clearly added as afterthoughts, ruining any true layout or design. Not so with Craigslist, the layout is solid and design appropriate. Design is a solution to a problem, not a decoration or embellishment.
So we should stop swallowing tripe for cream. As designers, it’s time for some of us to see that the emperor has no clothes and to use our insight, understanding and training to define what we agree with rather than mindlessly going along with idiots in the crowd. We have a responsibility to avoid pseudoscience and pseudointellectualism as it relates to what we produce for our clients and what we share with our fellow designers. If we’ve not got a sufficient grasp of things to see through this sort of drivel, perhaps we should go back to school or find another line of work.
Bottom line is designers need a foundation to ward off ridiculous ideas like “bad design creates success”. We shouldn’t relegate ourselves to simply sailing whichever way the wind is blowing this week. When the wind smells bad, it’s time to get upwind of the bullshit.
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_…feeding you a load of crap… time to call bullshit… boys and girls… if your product sucks, you suck… Google’s logo pretty much sucks… these companies that have suckass website designs… the design sucks… boys and girls…. if your product sucks, you suck…. we’re talking about human behavior here, folks… stop swallowing tripe for cream… the emperor has no clothes… it’s time to get upwind of the bullshit._
I feel like I just read a rant by a 12 year old!
I hate that Larry and Serge make so much money and that they get all the chicks, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Google interface (web site if you will) is brilliant in its simplicity, and the search results are good, and that’s why it works.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html?pg=12
Not to demean your efforts (I think the Google Redux looks terrific and is eminently more usable) but even if the Google homepage was replaced with your Google Redux homepage layout, I don’t think it would significantly affect the number of people who use it or the frequency with which it is used. I’ll bet there’s a memo in Google HQ somewhere that says the homepage should never, ever be modified beyond recognition. The spartan, slightly cluttered look of the Google homepage says, “The homepage looks like this because we spend all of our R&D budget on improving the search results and developing other tools.” In the grand scheme, how much time does one spend looking at the Google homepage vs the results? There’s nothing to navigate and no info I need to parse through. When I really need to locate something on the Google website, guess what I use? Yep, the search, not the navigation.
“We’re so confident that our search is superior that we shun homepage development so that you’ll use search to navigate our website.”
Won’t disagree that eBay is clumsy but I think Google is brilliant. When it started out people gravitated towards it not because it was a better search engine than Yahoo – but because it was a simple clean page.
Now page two of Google sucks… but 99% of the users never get beyond the first page.
And the logo is great. It’s legible and the mods are fun. How many other logos are built to be modified daily?
The best way to achieve that is by 1) not being complicated and 2) not changing hardly at all.
Since most non-tech people think Google is the front door to the internet, less and familiar are the best attributes.
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I may agree that visually it does little for me as a designer. But as long as the field autofocuses upon page load, I’m fine.
Good design might not always be required to make a business succeed but bad design certainly never helps. Super-simple isn’t always right, over-design never is and as someone once said, “more isn’t more, less isn’t more, just enough is more”.
Since when did people copy of Google?
I like this one better, by the way: “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”
– Albert Einstein
The design is RUBBISH!
Hoorah Andy! Love the Article…
If the Google homepage matched your mock up, and by extension, the rest of the Google web site needed to follow that design, it would create a humongous amount of extra work to maintain and enhance.
So it is actually partially accurate to say that Google and eBay’s lack of “good design” is, in fact, a driver of their successes. We unfortunately cannot test this hypothesis, but I suspect that if eBay and Google would have done the necessary work to make their entire sites match your mock up, they may not be as successful as they have been.
I would argue that the Google homepage is well-designed, for the simple reason that the only two objects on the page that draw focus are the brand and the search box, and those are all that’s important to 99.9% of visitors. Beyond that, the page is designed to be small so it can load quickly (your version looks to be much more weighty, and when you serve as many page views per day as Google, it adds up).
This article singles out eBay and Google (and so does your personal site), when in fact I think that their designs are quite well done, not to mention easy-to-use. They simply tend to the very-uncluttered end of the spectrum (one could say “less-styled”).
Beyond that, I think your main point (that good product can pull poor design, if I’m interpreting correctly) is quite on-target. But good design can definitely supplement good product better. I also agree with other commenters that words like “suckass” and “shit” are unnecessary, even if this article was originally posted on your personal site.
And as a side-note: set any text in Catull, bevel it and fill with primary colors, and almost anyone will immediately associate it with Google. Now that’s branding.
Where? Who’s saying this? And who’s listening? This is the sort of argumentation that Fox News uses: “some people say you kill children, are you calling them liars?”
I say you are lying, sir. You are simply lying when you state the premise of this article. You do not have some guru in mind you don’t want to offend, and you cannot point to a “recurring…theme” that anyone is taking seriously.
Here’s the real theme: Google and ebay are massive successes by any measure. They have millions upon millions of successful customers. In what possible universe could you complain that design is holding them back?
But your redesign is horridly unusable and just adds confusion and makes it look like any other page.
Aesthetics do matter to most people, think of any time you’ve gone shopping for clothes or for a car. Good design can make our lives a little easier, and make us a little bit happier in the process. Ultimately you do have to have substance underneath that exterior for your product to be worthwhile, but it doesn’t hurt to be a little sexy on the outside. Just look at what Apple has done, and what Windows Vista promises to do (finally Microsoft is getting it!).
”[craigslist] is not like eBay or Google, as it succeeds because of the design rather than spite of it…the layout is solid and design appropriate…”
Are you looking at the same sea of links I get when I go to craigslist.org?
Seriously though, I think you’ve totally missed the point of interface design as it relates to the success of a product:
* Bad product + bad design = no success
* Bad product + good design = no success
* Good product + bad design = no success
* Good product + good design = success
If the design of eBay/Google were so bad, people would not be able to sell/buy/search, and the sites would fall away to other competitors.
One last point: how can you get on your high horse about the design of these sites without any understanding of the companies’ business goals? Or are your judgements of these sites intended to be taken as “pure design, without constraints”? Yawn.
If you read the articles, you’d know that these were not my redesign efforts, but rather exercises to illustrate some specifices of design and usability. Google and eBay were merely my whippin boys, as they clearly have issues that should be resolved.
To do an actual redesign of either of these sites would require my having loads of information to which I’m not currently privy, and an extensive disovery process. Not to mention, a tidy sum of cash. But this was not my intent and I’ll appreciate your sticking to facts in your disagreements, not beating me up based upon your own distortions. Sometimes, reading articles is more informative than looking at them.
And for the nameless, faceless, annonymous individuals who are compelled to chime in here, don’t. If you’re afraid of letting on who you are, your comments are not worth anyone’s time. Go and misrepresent yourself to someone else. Real people’s comments are often worthwhile. Fake people’s, not so much. Thanks.
Also, your definition of design is a graphical one, right? “Design” = “pretty” right? Google is pretty. Ebay isn’t. Both work great, as their interface design seems to work even for my mom.
If you want to talk “design” as in “site looks pretty” you oughta start bashing those blogs out there that all look the same.