IT'S GOOD TO BE BAD. 4.12.06
Every few months, some schmuck comes around with a blog post about how "bad design succeeds on the web". And of course, the web designers of the world tear his head off, while others (whom we can only assume are his friends and family) chime in to support him. I guess my aim here is to settle the argument, though designers much wiser than I have tried to do the same, and yet the ship of fools still sails. Well, I suppose if I can't win the argument, I can still piss some people off along the way.
These protagonists of bad design seem to think they have plenty of ammunition to work with; oft-cited sites like Google and MySpace are fodder for their claims of bad design being a good thing. But the thing about Google and MySpace is that they qualify for yet another web-ism, and this one happens to actually be correct: "content is king". Users will flock to your horribly designed site as long as you can peddle great content. As a search engine, Google does not have much inherent content, but instead serves as a portal to virtually all content. The search capability is what people go there for, and so the search capability is the content. The fact that Google does not bury its search capability under flashy ads and teaser articles for women's health (everybody wave to msn.com and aol.com) is what makes it a successful design. You go to Google to search for something. Google's page has its logo, some out-of-the-way links, and a big white search box. That's not a bad design. That's a design that knows you're there for the search box- the content- and it shoves that content right in your face. It's too easy a problem to solve to call it a good design, but it certainly is not a bad design.
MySpace, unlike Google, actually is a bad design. In fact, I'd say it's the worst-designed site that has ever been that successful. But again, content is king, and you certainly are a fool if you think seeing your ex-girlfriend post pictures of herself making out with two other girls at a bar isn't the best content on the web by a wide margin. MySpace could be ten times less user-friendly and still be successful. People would be willing to do some excrutiatingly mortifying deeds to see content like that, and you think a mere browser crash or slow-loading page is going to stop them? MySpace succeeds in spite of its horrible design, and probably wouldn't do much better if it actually did have a good design structure. It simply has too much good content for people to care about the way that it's delivered; they'll take the content any way they can get it.
Plenty of websites (and products... and corporations...) have succeeded in spite of their poor designs, simply because they offered something that was worth the sacrifice. It's nothing new, and it's nothing to give credence to. If you mimic the MySpace design, your site will fail. It will probably fail anyway, but if you actually design it well, you can only give yourself a better chance. The point to be made is that good design- like good advertising- is never going to ring the register, no matter how good it is. What it will do is generate a line of people out the door and down the block who think they want what you're hawking. It's your job to actually make the sale, so to speak. You will never get that kind of exposure with bad design... you might get it through other avenues, such as word-of-mouth or bad publicity, but obviously not with bad design. Anyone who disregards design, or deliberately designs something badly, is simply creating greater dependency on the product to sell itself. Furthermore, if for some reason they end up succeeding, they should not make the tragic mistake of thinking the bad design somehow contributes to the success. It should still be viewed as a glaring liability, and a severe chink in their armor.