Can ugly be good UX?

Question

It's heresy I know, but look at DrudgeReport.com. It's raw, hand written HTML, it's plain, boring typography, it's something any UX or Graphic designer would scoff at if you handed it across their desk. But it works, and it works well.

Drudge's design has been fairly consistant and it's pretty much exactly what it looks like, it's raw HTML and it has barely been changed since 1997. Lots of mud is slung at it's design, but it's considered by some to be one of the best on the web.

Drudge's design scores great on conventional measures of usability: It's effective, users find stories that they consider interesting and stories are prioritized to indicate "big" news. It's always clear what's a link (underlined) and what's not. It's efficient, there's hardly any interface and a simple click on a headline takes you where you need to go. Arguably it's satisfying, it's a highly ranked site, though I don't have any user satisfaction surveys on hand.

So when can something aesthetically "ugly" give great UX and how? What else does deliver this ugly but beautiful level of effective plainness? Craigslist.com is another example of this, though arguably not as great from a usability standpoint. I don't often see sites like Drudge Report, but it's interesting to consider such an unconventionally minimalistic implementation and where it can be applicable.

Update: I'm not talking about just usability; it's long been known that you can have a super efficient and effective design and people hate it because it looks like crap. I'm talking about designs that look "ugly" but still leave the user with a good or even a great experience, experiences people enjoy for than just the bare functional reasons, but not because of pleasant, trumped up aesthetics either.

Answer 1

A resounding “yes” from my direction.

Often, UX/usability is worsened because people want to make things "pretty" (animations, distracting graphics etc.)

Another example many will agree with: Blender. Highly usable, when you're used to it.

Answer 2

I think this calls for a distinction between UX and "usability."

An ugly design can certainly be usable, but does it always provide a good "user experience?" Would we be happier with Drudge Report if it looked better? Maybe...

I'd say it depends on the product. A "news ticker" style site doesn't have to look good--people want to get the information and get out. A car is a good example of the opposite. There are plenty of ugly cars that do their intended job very well, but having a fancy car certainly improves the experience.

Answer 3

Content is king...

Is this true? Well often it is, but not always. Sometimes it is not all about the content, because the content simply does not hold the intrinsic value.

Perhaps it might be reworded as communication is king. Because if a website cannot communicate its message, there is no point in it being there at all. In order to communicate, there is an important prerequisite - people have to come and read it - which usually means it needs to be a good resource.

Let's say you visit a beautifully designed website and take away the pretty layout, the colours, the attractive images and logos, and strip it down to bear bones elements that are simply communicating the messages.

I bet a lot of the time you'd be left with a fairly minimal set of messages, and marketing would probably be horrified at the low number of really useful messages left sitting there on the screen, a bit lonely looking. Yep - it's the designers worst nightmare!

You might be taking away a lot of the aesthetics - but that's all it is. It's like looking at the core content of a pure CSS website. For some, removing this skin over the top of the content will bring the website down to a more approachable level. There's no pretending to be something it's not, there's no subliminal messaging - no feeling of being persuaded to do something.

By doing this, you've removed a number of social, visual, cognitive, expectational and ethnographic barriers - a good thing. Ok, not pretty, but good going!

Now if you are a marketing person, you'll quickly realize you can increase the density of useful messages on the screen and get a corresponding increase in effectiveness of the website - ie.. greater communication per unit area.

Result: There's any number of marketeers who make ugly websites, but even marketeers can see there are limits in effectiveness of communication with increasing density of information, so simple mark-up and small amounts of whitespace still get used to highlight and separate messages. This prevents a ugly working website from becoming an ugly non-working website.

Let's be fair; marketeers aren't stupid. They can see when a change to their website starts getting less visitors or making less money - they'll be watching it like a hawk. In actuality, your ugly (but working) website is probably very finely tuned!

Wikipedia is not a pretty site, but it's functional, it communicates well, and it's been designed within a tight specification because it's what works for the people who use it. Functionality is king.

Wikipedia, Craigs List, The drudge Report - they all are highly functional, highly communicative, and indispensable resources for many people. They don't need aesthetics - if they did, they wouldn't do their job so well.

So when it comes down to it, perhaps the holy grail of web design really is achieved when there is special and exclusive meeting of the three kings: content, communication and functionality.

Answer 4

Ugly is, of course, a matter of taste, but if we take it to mean unpolished, unfinished or disproportionate and clashing, I believe it can be good UX provided the ugly strengthens the overall direction and theme of the product. Taking the Drudge Report example, the ugly design suggests unvarnished news, straight from the source and free of the polishing that would otherwise diminish the truth.

Ugly design can make people feel like they haven't spent money on aesthetic work, even though the ugliness is itself an aesthetic choice tuned to evoke that feeling.

In some cases, what we call ugly is simply unadorned or industrial. Rugged laptop designs, and for a long time, the super-tough Brenthaven laptop bags, were decidedly ugly and insisted that they were letting no aesthetic choice interfere with the mission of durability.

If the audience believes that pretty diminishes the value, then ugly is good UX. Whether it hampers usability or other aspects of the experience is a different matter.

Answer 5

I agree with almost everything said here, designers (myself included) can often times give up something that's useful for something pretty, without realizing it. In no way am I advocating for design over a usable experience. However, what about the ability to scan information and information overload?

Personally, I find the page EXTREMELY hard to scan through. Since almost all of the text is made up of hyper-links, what's the point in underlining them? To me that just creates more visual noise, and make it harder to scan. Admittedly, I am nit-picking here, but here's the way I see it:

Reasons to Underline a link:

1. Links are 'traditionally' underlined
2. To differentiate it visually from the page content
3. In a list of links, with the same leading, a user may hover on a link to take away it's underline. In this scenario the underline indicates the full title of the link, making it clearer within the list of links.

www.nytimes.com does a good job in differentiating there links with a COLOR, leaving no need for an underline. They then can use a thin line to separate each article without creating more visual noise. Links are blue, content is black and time stamps are red. This makes the page quickly scannable. I can see all the headlines (links), quickly read excerpts from the headlines I care about (black) and sift through fresh content via timestamp (red). The links also utilize the :visited state so that I can see what I've already read or visited.

I don't see any of these being the case in this site. The links are all underlined, essentially ALL of the text is underlined as a result, this is hard to read. To add to the noise, there are borders in between each link. Wouldn't it be more clear if it was JUST the borders and no underlines?

Another thing that I don't agree with is that there is no :visited link state. I think in a site like this, it's VERY important. I would assume frequent visitors would like to be VISUALLY informed of what links they've already clicked on instead of sifting through the content over and over. This is a huge part of scan-ability in my opinion. An example of my reasoning:

I wake up in the morning, have a few cups of coffee and browse around on the Drudge report, click a few links that interest me, then go to work. Later that night, I come home and pull up the site again to see what news has been posted throughout the day. IF THE :VISITED LINKS WERE DIFFERENT IN COLOR: I could easily see where in the body of the site I was browsing earlier, and as a result, visually see all of the content above it as "new" without needing to read it.

To me, sites like Reddit and Google use the :visited state to the best of it's ability to do what it was meant to: Inform the user that they have visited this link. Especially in a "News" setting where there are many similar headlines coming all day long that may only vary by a few words.

What interests me is that the design has stayed the same for so long, and that is frequented by so many users. Does this mean that the design is good, or that the users have 'trained' themselves to use the site?

I'm not saying it's a horrible experience, at all. I do prefer utilitarian design when it comes to fresh content consumption, but I think this does have a few major flaws that could easily be remedied without diluting the experience.

Answer 6

Ugly can be good UX. No single UX factor is a universal deal-breaker, and you can have good UX even when some of the criteria aren't good - it depends on the product. But an ugly website that provides good UX will provide better UX after it's made more beautiful.

A distinction must be made between visual appeal and brand/trademark appearance. Craigslist's appearance became part of their identity, but if it was launched today looking like that, noone would spare it a second glance.

Another distinction must be made between business success and good UX. Success can be the result of a myriad factors, of which UX is only one, and (unfortunately for us) not the crucial one. DrudgeReport is successful in spite of its UX, not because of it.

Answer 7

I think wether something is ugly or not depends entirely on the person looking at the page. Someone who is color blind for example may not be a big fan of a site like 8thcontinent.com even though it's a clever design.

The bigger question when it comes to usability and more specifically your question about design (in regards to ugliness) is how easy the website is to use. As mentioned in another comment, sometimes designers/developers like to put too much animations, notifications, etc... on a page which can distract people from the content.

Ugly itself is not why drudgereport.com is successful. My guess is that the two following reasons are why Drudge Report get's so much love.

1. It's Consistent - It hasn't changed much over time, so users don't have to worry about learning a new UI every 6 month's or a year like FaceBook.
2. It's Easy - Everybody can easily find what they are looking for. The content is covered over with so many ad's, videos, bells, and whistles that is sometimes gets in the way of what you are trying to look for. (like MySpace was a few years ago).

Whitespace is an important factor in design. Use it to highlight your content and keep the page simple.

The best example of a simple website with no major graphical designs is Sofa Software. While the company was recently purchased, the site is still up and you can see how an "ugly" design can make a beautiful site!

Answer 8

I firmly believe that ugly doesn't necessarily mean bad UX.

If we take a look at one of the many versions of the adapted Maslow's hierarchy pyramid adapted to the field of UX

we can see that aesthetics (that is ugly, good looking etc.) is a high order need which alone is far from enough to provide good UX if the basic needs are not covered (the lower you get in the hierarchy the higher the importance of the need). So if the functionality or the way the information is delivered (in terms of correctness etc.) the user won't stick around to enjoy how pretty your product is. Of course this is the general case since there are some users who have their priorities upside down and there is nothing that you can do about that but just consider them exceptions. If your product is working, it is allowed some ugliness. If it covers all basic needs and the need of usability then it is allowed even more ugliness. The "perfect" product has all four needs covered but this isn't something that we see all that often. And even with all covered there is the thing...

The need for aesthetics unlike the rest of the needs is something that is extremely subjective. You can measure the functionality, the information and usability of a product but its aesthetic qualities cannot be measured accurately (even if you can have all the humanity as test subjects). It is basically

I like buttons with blue borders and you - with red. Which border colour is better - blue or red? Or perhaps purple? But we both don't like purple however a third person enjoys it a lot...

I have witnessed people enjoying the way this and that product looks (software applications, web sites etc.) that literally make me want to kill myself.

In the example URL you have provided we have the basic two needs fulfilled:

• web site works (it's also fast due to the absence of Flash and what not which is a nice perk!)
• information is provided in a correct, readable manner and doesn't make your eyes bleed

Even the fourth need - usability - might be considered covered here since except for the few images it's text only. This combined with the lack of dropdown menus and what not allows fast access using text search which is part of every web browser nowadays (I hope...).

The need for aesthetics here might also be covered for some people since simplicity is something that some of us consider beautiful.

The only problem with an ugly product is that it more difficult to establish as such compared to a pretty one. However once the customer finds out that your product doesn't work properly for example no matter how pretty it is the chances of him/her returning it is high to almost always the case.

Answer 9

Absolutely. Utility drives people to use your product; usability retains users, makes them more productive; and beauty engages them and makes them advocates of your product. I wrote a blog post on this a while back.

However, all other things being equal, a beautiful and usable interface will trump an ugly and usable interface. Simply because people ARE able to find value in an ugly interface isn't a good enough reason to tolerate it.

Finally--beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One man's ugliness is another man's gold.

Answer 10

I can't see what the site is about. Following the UX/Theming I still can't see what it is about. Reading a couple of text blurbs I still can't see what the site is about. Looking at the theming it looks like a cheap school pamphlet.

A simple improvement to make it look more like a newspaper should improve the uptake of new visitiors!

Answer 11

I would say its a success despite its ugliness; probably because it conforms to a certain political ideology.

UX-wise it's terrible: hard to scan; aesthetically dull; poor use of headings and white space. With improvements to these things it would be even more popular.

Answer 12

Yes, in the same way you can have a good experience in an ugly room. Would the experience be better if you didn't think the room was ugly? Most likely.

Let's stick with the room metaphor: This doesn't necessarily mean that you should make the room noticably pretty. An understated, unremarkable room design could provide a much better experience for you in certain situations (e.g. when you're trying to study) than a beautiful eye-catching design.

Answer 13

Ugly can definitely be good UX. This is a design mistake that I see designers often make.

UX is all about clarity, coherence, and user-friendliness. It is not about how pretty or creative a website is- that is what the interface design is for. There is a large difference between UX and UI, and this is also something that people get confused between, very often.

While the way an app or website looks IS part of a user's experience- it is more of the user interface designer's job to make it look not "ugly".

"Clarity and coherence should always be a priority over creativity." - B2C