Why Your Beautiful Product Might Be Failing

Here is a fun truth about craigslist. Because it seems to be prepared in 1995, it was mainly. Purple connections, text walls, zero visual hierarchy. Design students use it as an example of not doing this. Again, millions of operations are processing every month, and their beautiful design rivals died when they die.

This should bother you. It is bothering me. We need to know better as product managers. User experience, design thinking and talking about all Jazzah. But then the craigslist sits there, sinned, as a sin, punches are given.

The truth is that the truth is that entrepreneurs and products are in love with the wrong things. When users just want to correct, we are obsessed on the perfect interfaces of pixels. Rivals with funny sans are discussing the printing press when eating our lunch. This is not just about aesthetics – about what a majority misunderstanding of what products are successful.

Take Google’s homepage in 1999. Slurs. Cruel. Just a logo and a search box. Meanwhile Yahoo was building this magnificent portal with news, weather and stock market quotes on this magnificent portal. Yahoo had a better design of an ordinary event. More feature. A better visual hierarchy. Topical graphics. It was like a Google Student Project. Guess which one has earned.

Related: Good product design is more than aesthetics – how to practically balance to attract more investors

Design Theater

The psychology behind it is amazing. The significant 34.6% of the world’s visitors show that they strongly prefer simple and understandable information structures. But somehow, when setting up the products, we convince users to ask for something more complex. It is more elegant. More beautiful.

It’s what I call the “Design Theater” – when the form is more of a performance art than form purposeful functions. You see everywhere. While working hardware, the months spend months that are perfectional in months. Enterprise software companies create “delicious experiments” for users who should export only one spreadsheet to hire expensive design agencies.

Reddit is another perfect example. Reddit has 234 million unique users, 8.19 billion billion months and 25 million daily sounds – have not been updated since 2005. The site works as users want: Content, conversation and society. Not gradients. Not micro interactions. Just things that are important.

Preferred the actual behavior

But where it is interesting here. Users say they want a nice design. They really do. In the surveys and focus groups, they will say that they prefer a more beautiful choice. Then they go home and actually use the working ugly.

This separation between the endured advantage and actual behavior is important to develop as the interfaces such as information and developing methods such as product managers and to know user needs. The data tells a story different from focus groups. Always trust the data.

Related: Your product’s design can cost you customers. That’s what you’re wrong (and how to correct it).

How do you know that you will prefer the form against the form? Here’s my frame.

Understand the work of your product first. Clayton Christensen’s theory “Work” Theory is perfectly applied here. No one hires a craigslist to have a nice walking experience. Hire to sell their sofas or finding an apartment. The ugliness actually helps – it shows that real people do not have a market that they do real operations.

Second, find the eve of acceptable ugliness. Yes, this is a real thing. There is a basic aesthetic demand in each product category. Dating applications should look better than the tax program. However, there is surprising flexibility in the categories. Hacker news is terrible and developing. Designer news looks beautiful and fighting. The same audience, the same goal, different results.

Third, try your hypotheses ruthlessly. Not with surveys. Not with interviews. With real behavior. Start an ugly version and a handsome version. See which one is better transformed. You could be surprised. I saw this game dozens – loading faster because it is loading faster, it works better on the mobile phone or simply leaves the user’s way.

The problem for product managers returns the design-first way of thinking without a villain transformation. You don’t want to be a person who kills joy. But six-month polishing your team cannot allow to polish something that should be sent in two weeks.

What’s on the job

Edit everything in terms of user results. Instead of discussing if there are four pixels or six pixels from the edge of the button, ask the user’s problem is the solution. Talk about cognitive load instead of arguing on color schemes. Circle a conversation about effectiveness rather than aesthetics.

Also, note the ugly victories. Record Reddit when we hit another billion. When the craigslist is superior to another opponent, bring it. Set up a culture that achieves results over humility.

This does not mean that you create ugly products purposefully. Delicious design is certainly good for good products, but the product is actually useful, it is primitive, it is primarily important. The issue is to solve your priorities in the correct sequence. First function. Then form. Always in this order.

Related: Art to create large products

The most successful products find the sweet point – enough design to not actively repel users, but enough design to be in the way to work. They understand that sometimes the ugly users are what needs.

Your wonderful product may fail because you solve the wrong problem. When you work this you are pretty pretty. It’s a trap. Now you know how to get it.