On Why Ugly Design Works

Granted, polished marketing campaigns can leave the user feeling unconnected with the product and folksy looking interfaces enable a level of trust by leveling the relationship between service provider and consumer

Users have marketing BS filters and while its possible to shortcut a connection with anti-marketing, if everyone started doing it tomorrow.. what would happen?

Anti marketing is just another strategy. Something you have to put effort and thought into to get right.

If BMW put fake wood paneling on the side of the next 5 series and relied on word of mouth advertising, would this folksy approach sell more? It would just shift your customer base.

Does Scoble think it would be a good idea if PlentyOfFish asked the users to buy in to the Anti Marketing concept and only post their ugliest picture, because potential mates are more likely to trust and connect with you?

Is the MySpace design popular because it looks like it was coded by a dsylexic peruvian mountain goat on acid… or because it looks like a teenager’s bedroom?

Ugly designs work because they are still well designed products that meet the target user’s goal. Not becuase the user implicitly distrusts all things marketed to them in the traditional manner.

Except I don’t think love==ugly. Take a look at the iPod. That’s definitely a device that the designers heaped love upon and it’s everything BUT ugly.

I think the trick is to make the design fit the audience (duh). And if your audience appreciates the aesthetic stylings of strung-out Peruvian mount goats with reading problems, you’re Web site better reflect that design “sensibility”.

The same design won’t attract visitors to a site where the topic is investment banking or do-it-yourself home surgery.

Scoble’s comment sounds like a strong endorsement of open source software, and a rather devastating (if unintended) critique of Microsoft.

On the other hand you could view it as an endorsement of the hacked-together ill conceived Windows UI design over the polished well marketed OS X implementation.

I dont want to sound overly critical but he uses terms that are too general and concepts too broad so he can give the uninformed reader the impression he’s hit upon a new design concept which is going to be something of an NBT. When in fact its nothing more than bricks and mortar shops becoming ’shoppe’ to give the illusion of mom & pop’ness. Its a neat trick, it can be done on the web, big deal.

I don’t really subscribe to the idea that design can be separated into “ugly” and “pretty”. Either it works or it doesn’t. If it serves a certain purpose for the brand, by all means use times new roman at 20px, but that doesn’t necessarily work in all situations.

At the end of the day it’s how much money you get out of it that counts.