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Ugly good design

Here's an eye-popping thought: a web site can be both ugly and well-designed. The opposite is also true: someone once referred tp an e-commerce site we were trying to fix as "a beautiful crappy site" - it was graphically wonderful, but you couldn't find products or get reliable information about shipping costs, and much of the time you couldn't even check out.

The converse is that you could have a site that's butt-ugly, but is very well designed (as in architecture) for what it's supposed to do. Joshua Porter at Vitamin argues that this is the case with Myspace.

To the people who use it, the visual design of MySpace communicates one message loud and clear: MySpace is your social life. Every feature, every design element, serves to reinforce this. It may not be pretty, but as long as people can easily hang out virtually with their friends, it doesn’t have to be. So in terms of communicating value to its users, MySpace actually does a very good job.

Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it? Sometimes as designers we feel the need to repurpose and restyle content out of its raw form. MySpace, however, shows that simple exposure might be all that’s needed. danah boyd, who researches MySpace, writes about designing to allow for personal style: “Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use.”

jon posted this at 9:02 AM
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