[danielmason]

Coming from a user interface design background, I thought this article posited a couple of false dichotomies which were perplexingly echoed in the comments here. Their suggestions appeared to be targeted at either amateurs, ad professionals, or flash jockeys, because a good designer would likely be taking this advice already. The gist of the article is summed up nicely by a commenter here: "Usability trumps design every time." I find that perplexing, because my goal as a designer was always to find the most usable solution through design.

1. Value -- a good designer will take the time to understand the the target audiences. Many target audiences aren't looking for value, they're looking for status or something just as intangible. Implementing a visual design which communicates something the target audience isn't searching for is closely akin to pricing your product incorrectly. In fact, design approach is almost completely analogous to retail product price stratification.

2. Trust -- this again depends on audience. Sometimes "labor of love" is the most relevant trust mark, but in other cases it's "well-established" or "industry leader."

3. Accessibility -- this is kind of a 'duh' for any experienced web developer. Most design-oriented site you go to are built for modern browsers only, but that's because all their visitors are using Firefox. Any good web designer still knows how to fix an IE6 margin-doubling bug, for example.

4. Flexibility -- um, it really is possible to design sites with good UI and flexible content. Would anyone here make the argument that Craigslist would have failed with proper whitespacing, appropriate font selections, and logical visual hierarchies? Those can all be accomplished with a single stylesheet.

5. Function -- this really is the point of design. Most good designers would tell you that. Design without utility is bad art. I love user interface design because I can build things that look good and work well. The two go hand-in-hand.

I may be reading too much into the comment that "in general, aesthetics simply don't matter." If that's really true, do you have a good explanation for Apple's success? How about Nike?

[FleursDuMal]

"Would anyone here make the argument that Craigslist would have failed with proper whitespacing, appropriate font selections, and logical visual hierarchies? Those can all be accomplished with a single stylesheet."

Many successful websites (Google, craigslist, ebay, wikipedia, myspace etc) are both highly functional and divergent from "good design practices".

What I find troubling is that I don't believe any of those sites would have been constructed in their successful form by a design professional. We don't fully understand how people's perceptions are shaped by the presentation of information.

Having appropriate whitespace/fonts etc produces a clean looking site which conforms to a very particular aesthetic which has no proven connection to the success of a site and may substantially harm it.

[danielmason]

There's no doubt that some of the most successful sites have been pretty ugly. But to imitate the ugliness smacks of cargo cultism -- reproducing side effects in hopes of receiving a similar result. To me, the commonality shared by the sites you mentioned isn't their aesthetics, but rather that they represented either a radical innovation or a radical improvement over existing services. I DO believe this was a result of their engineering focus in the early stages, a side effect of which was poor aesthetics, but I don't think it's a clear indicator that an engineer-driven product cannot also benefit from smart design. Google's move to break the Altavista portal mode of thinking and present the user with a large, isolated search box was first and foremost a design decision.

I think Mint is a good example of design driving success. Mint is largely built on the Yodlee platform, but they made the interface their primary focus. I don't get any information from Mint that I can't get on my bank's website. But since signing up for Mint, I check my accounts twice as frequently, classify all of my purchases, track my financial history, and set budgets. I didn't have to wrestle myself into these habits, either -- they came naturally because Mint made them easy and available. And honestly, I would never have trusted my bank account information to a site that looked like early-days eBay.

[underdown]

Surely Apple and Nike's successes aren't completely dependant on design. Apple in particular are at least masters of the product launch and PR in general. They also make an above average operating system.