Wonderfully Designed vs. Beautifully Designed Websites

Daniel Burka, design partner at Google Ventures, recently wrote an article on The Pastry Box Project about how we tend to beautify things, sometimes at the cost of their functionality.  We all have a predilection for beautiful things: shiny cars, nice clothes, and a good-looking online store.

The problem with this is that we tend to confuse beautiful things with well-designed things.  The common thought process is that if it looks great, it must function great.  That is not always the case.

Take a look at Google.  Even Daniel Burka from Google Ventures admits it:  Google’s logo is not ideal.  However, it carries with it incredible brand identity.  As Daniel puts it,

“To me it screams: ‘Google is honestly a bunch of geeks who just want to make awesome software that makes your life better.’”

Now, isn’t that exactly the message it should exude?  Don’t get so lost in design that you lose sight of the purpose of your ecommerce store.  You want to sell something online.  Right?  Then, spend your time and energy first and foremost on making sure your online store functions as well as it possibly can.  After that, you can make it as beautiful as your heart desires.

Wonderfully Designed > Beautifully Designed.  Any Day.

I recently was trying to buy a product on a website that was filled with large images, zooming features, cool transitions, videos, and buttons galore.  The website was so bogged down that it took at least 20 seconds for the homepage to load.  When it finally loaded, I was so frustrated that they instantly lost my sale.  Don’t expect that kind of wait time from most customers (honestly, the only reason I stayed was out of disbelief and shock).  Typically, 57% of web users will abandon a site after 3 seconds of it not loading (Strangeloop Networks).  After all, if your website looks great but is not functional, then what does it even matter at that point?  The sale was compromised simply because they got carried away with design.  The cost of un-reliable web performance is enormous and should not be overlooked when creating your website.

“A 1-second decrease in Amazon’s page load time would annually cost $1.6 Billion in sales (SmartBear).”

Don’t confuse a beautiful looking website with one that functions beautifully.

Let’s take a look at some large, successful companies with some not-so-beautiful designs:

Reddit

Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, recently spoke about the Reddit web design in an interview:

“One of the things we wanted to make sure is that we put content above everything.  We wanted a good user experience. We knew that even if the site were pretty, had all the rounded corners in the world, and drop-shadows, but didn’t have good content, treated its users poorly, and [created] a bad user experience, then people wouldn’t go.”

In Reddit’s case, their product is their content.  That was their focus, and they didn’t need a beautiful website to provide that to their customers.  Reddit is a great example of how you can still survive (and even thrive) if your website is plain.

Craigslist

Craigslist.com is ugly, but it is intuitive and highly utilitarian.  You get in, find what you need/post what you need, and get out.  Steven Bradley of Vanseo Design agrees:

“If anything, a beautiful Craigslist could easily give the wrong impression of what you’ll find inside. Walking into a beautiful showroom you’ll likely expect higher prices and more luxury items. Beautiful aesthetics could send the wrong message as to what Craigslist is. Its non- aesthetic look actually aligns quite well with the brand of Craigslist.”

Walmart

I love how Daniel Burka, Google design partner, so eloquently wrote about Walmart:

“Only a truly brave designer would choose heaps of dull grey, burgundy, and navy for a brand. Let alone facing about 8500 gigantic stores in asphalt shingles and cinder blocks. Every designer I’m familiar with would have come up with something more akin to Target’s hip(per) look. Yet, when you’re speeding down an eight lane freeway, there’s no doubt whatsoever that the ‘ugly’ Walmart store that sits miles away on the horizon contains the cheapest frozen chicken you’ll find anywhere in your region.”

Regardless of how these websites and logos look, they all work really well for the purpose that they are meant to serve.  Therefore, they are all well-designed.

Design is so much more than what it looks like on the exterior; design is about functionality.

“[Design] is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” -Steve Jobs.

Design is Usability

Whether it is beautiful or not, usability is key.

Aesthetics and web design have great value, as long as the core of the website has beautiful functionality.  In fact, aesthetics can actually emphasize the functionality of your website and the quality of your product.

“See with one eye, feel with the other.”- Paul Klee

It is inevitable that customers will make an instant judgment about the value of your product based on your web design, but beautiful design is not the end-all, be-all of your entire ecommerce site.  Visual and functional beauty are not unrelated, though.  Aesthetics are indeed a very important and powerful element of your ecommerce site.  Mike Kus wrote:

“Easy to use, accessible websites and beautiful, meaningful aesthetics are not mutually exclusive. The key is to apply style and aesthetic design appropriately. We need to think about who and what we’re designing for and ask ourselves why we’re applying a certain kind of aesthetic style to our design. If you do this, there’s no reason why effective, functional design should come at the expense of jaw-dropping, meaningful aesthetics.”

Think of your ecommerce store as a car.  Even if you are not an automotive engineer, you can probably still tell if the car is designed well simply based on its performance.  You might make an instant judgment about the car based upon its exterior, but if you get inside and it drives like a Ferrari then it won’t really matter how it looks because it’s fulfilling its purpose: getting you from Point A to Point B.

Having a beautifully-functioning website is similar to having well-oiled engine.  You can always slab some paint on the car or redesign your ecommerce store, but the essential purpose of it is to sell online.

In order to be successful at selling online, choose an ecommerce platform that is both wonderfully designed and beautifully designed.  With these two elements in place, you will be able to achieve your goals of successfully selling online.