The fact is we don’t spend our time looking at websites. We spend our time reading and using them. There are three things a great web design must be: useful, useful and useful.
Too bad about the subject matter of that post:
The best websites are useful and ugly
Why does it have to be ugly?
In one word: MySpace. It’s an incredible over-night success story. It’s an incredibly ugly web site. Therefore, ugly is successful. Or at least that’s the impression you got from reading Robert Scoble, Aidan Henry, Joshua Porter, and many others. For a while there in 2006, I really thought we’re witnessing the beginning of a new design movement.
So what do you do in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence that ugly design rules*? You wait for the evidence to change. Not only did Facebook surpass MySpace (or is about to), of the top 5 social networks, 4 pay close attention to their UI design. Even Google started paying attention to design.
So what does that teach us, besides the folly of premature conclusions? That Web design has to be useful, useful and useful, but there’s no reason it has to be ugly.
(*) Other than correcting people that correlation does not imply causation.
Aristotle