Blog: archive page

• Does good design really matter?

  12 July 2011

  I was reading an article on BusinessWorld India and noticed a few of the winners of Young Entrepreneur awards having really bad website design / user interface.These businesses were Internet based business and they spent little / no time coming up with a good interface for their websites. And yet they won.

  As someone who likes simple design I went through their websites and was not so happy about the user interface. I think design is important part of a web site and a good UI can make or break at website. But in this case I was wrong, these website were badly designed, but yet as a company they were doing well. Their website converted(not sure how) and people we using it.

  So am I wrong with thinking that UI matters? I am not. As a person who enjoys good design I would not visit these websites or stay on it for more than 10 seconds. But clearly, their target audience were not people like me. Their audience were people who’s purpose was to post content and get information. As long as people could do this, the site was doing it’s job for them.

  But then if content really is attracting factor, what happens to all the time spend designing beautiful interfaces?Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make me Think best answers these questions. As people use their application / website more often they will start to loose interest in the product. If the UI is hard to use or makes people think, they will leave and move on to the next thing. To a web site / application which has a better UI.

  Maybe thats your competitive edge over your competitor. A better UI. And that will make all the difference.