When Ugly is Good: Design and Self-Image
In Design as Art, author Bruno Munari has a lot to stay about the personal taste of designers:
“A designer with a personal style, arrived at a priori, is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a personal style in a designer’s work. While a job is in hand, be it a lamp, a radio set, an electrical gadget or an experimental object, his sole concern is to arrive at the solution suggested by the thing itself and its destined use. Therefore different things have different forms, and these will be determined by their different uses and the different materials and techniques employed.”
To be clear, Munari isn’t arguing against an object feeling good or being aesthetically pleasing; his point is that the definition of “feels good” sits in the court of the user, not the designer.
Our visual style is a facet of ourselves, and while it is may result in work we love, it doesn’t mean it will resonate with our audience.
Braden Kowitz shares a great example of this. While testing a beautiful, clean Dribbble-able redesign of a coupon website with users, he found that it completely flopped with users, despite being wonderfully functional and usable. But why?
Psychology has some suggestions. When it comes to other people, we like those who reinforce how we view ourselves. That is to say, it’s not really about who that person is, so much as how they make us feel about ourselves and how that resonates with our own self-image.
The same principle applies to design: who does the user think they are and who do they want to be?
Let’s look back at that coupon site: it was created for bargain-hunters. Bargain-hunters see themselves as adventurers; they’re the Indiana Joneses of internet deals, digging through muck and yuck to unearth a golden prize, a secret back-alley trick for savings.
It’s easy to see why the coupon website failed when juxtaposed with the user’s self-image: it was serving the savings on a silver platter, depriving users of feeling skilled.
Thoughtful typography, pixel-perfect icons, engaging palettes… While these are powerful tools to be weld by good design, it’s an important to keep in mind that they are not good design in and of themselves. Visuals are our communication channel with our audience; when we let our personal tastes take hold, we speak a different tongue and risk miscommunications.
As designers, we live to serve the user and we need to be comfortable with making things that don’t necessarily please use aesthetically: if making an ugly design will help the users, by golly, that’s what we must do.
Chantal Jandard is a designer and probably too curious for her own good. You can find her on Twitter, talking about meaningful technology, design and other Very Important Things.
