Why making digital products ugly for the sake of usability is a “Dumb” idea !
Have you ever heard of the saying “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” ? Well the idea is that the contents which are inside the book is more important than the cover, but we end up falling for the cover anyways right ? Have you ever wondered why this happens even though we know that the cover doesn’t matter ? Well the answer lies in how we evolved as a species to perceive beautiful things to be better than not so beautiful things, and the same idea could be applied itself to every aspect of our daily lives, including digital product design…
How good design can foster positive attitudes
The “Aesthetic usability” effect is a phenomenon where product users find aesthetically appealing websites to be more usable than it’s “uglier” counterparts, This was demonstrated in a study conducted by Nielsen Norman group and the result of that study is as follows…
Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.
During the study the users were given certain tasks to do on a particular website, and most of them conducted the task with certain levels of difficulty, but when asked how their experience was they were more concerned about how they felt while using the website and that how, the usage of some colors within that website kind of made them feel at peace and all ignoring all the problems they faced while using it, although our objective might not be to mask the UX issues with beautiful designs but, through research like this we could be sure that having good UI could make our design a hell of a lot better….
Creating designs that would make an impact
Now this isn’t about helping malnourished kids in the Congo or to fight global warming, yes it is important, but by “Impact” what I’m referring here is the literal impact that products could have on people look at the two pictures given below for instance…
These are two things that serve the same purpose, both are phonebooths, in the early 2000’s these iconic red telephone booths were decommissioned by the authorities and were replaced by these really “Minimal” and bland-looking phone booths, which lack no character whatsoever.
But both serve their purpose equally, So essentially the whole entire question kind of boils down to this, the basic purpose of a digital product or any type of product is to do what they are meant to do in the best way possible, and if you think you only have to focus on it’s functionality and not how it looks as a designer you’re not doing justice to your job, because if there’s one thing that we could learn from the history of design or in a wider scale, the grand design of the universe is that, great design is always “timeless” and we should always strive to make timeless products.
Just take the above examples for instance, the Classic London telephone booth is a pop culture icon, you could see them as souvenirs if you walk the streets of London, It’s shown up in a multitude of movies, the best part is that you could show a picture of the booth to any person in any part of the world and they would say that it’s from London because it has been ingrained in people’s minds for so long that It’s now part of the general identity of that particular place.
Timeless design is also cheap and sustainable
Now this is an easy one, Let’s take an example from architecture, Let’s take these two concrete structures listed above for instance. One is The Colosseum from Ancient Rome, which has been standing there for roughly 1950 years, withstanding 5 major earthquakes, two fires and two world wars and the other one was destroyed completely when a plane crashed into it and has to be rebuilt all over again, one is visited by tourists both for its historical significance and it’s beauty, while the later is the old “World Trade Centre” visited just for it’s “recent” historical significance.
We know that a structure emits the most emissions when it’s built, so when you create buildings that are first bland, and ugly, and have to be torn apart and rebuilt every 30 years, where is the sustainability in that? And apart from that the total economic cost to build and rebuild the structure is disastrous, So building structures like this is not only “Unsustainable” but also “unethical” as well…
The same concept can be brought into digital product design as well, it is a fact that our computers produce carbon when we use them, which is obviously detrimental to the environment and also the sheer scale of building a big product cannot be compared to the scale of building a skyscraper still is a mammoth task with a lot of manpower and effort involved, so when we’re trying to make digital products, we should still have these principles in mind and develop a product that makes an impact on the minds of the customers and should be sustainable as well, when we design, we should strive to make designs that are timeless and beautiful while trying not to compromise too much on the functionality…
