Why (And When) You Should Not Make Your Product/Website The Prettiest

You can try and make your company’s website fancy, along with its’ whole brand, the visual direction, the logo and all the way down to the business cards.

Make it better than our competitor. Make it look “2020”. All sleek and modern.

Or, you can simply build everything with your main user profile in mind. Big buttons with “I want to do this” or “I want to do that”, since what you offer can be boiled down to this or that. This works fantastically well if:

• A. You’re dealing with complex issues
• B. Every other competitor is making it too much of a pain to navigate through their solution, so you just want to dumb it down to the simplest alternative.

There’s no need for “building the future” when all you want to say is “We’re helping you do X”

It sounds obvious. The theory is very easy. Like living a good life — we all know 95% of what we need to do in life. Sometimes, it falls apart and we wonder why.

We ignored the common advice (the 95% we know), since it’s… maybe not a shortcut. Or not easy enough.

“Maybe there’s a faster way”

“Maybe there’s an easier way”

— What someone might say about these things that we know about living a good life. Eating good, aiming at something high, keeping relationships etc.

So do the right thing. Even if it’s not the latest and most modern website. If you do it right, chances are you will go down a path where you carve yourself a very profitable area.

Getting to that point of high profitability means you will be able to hire whoever you want that can do both something sleek and modern AND highly-efficient or highly-converting.

I’m not saying you will carve your area of profitability. All I said was “chances are”.

In other words, you at least play your chance at finding it, as opposed to going the “most modern and cool”.

I help SaaS CEOs reduce user churn, running Chagency_, an experiences design agency and writing daily. Say hi here or on Twitter!👋