People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

Designer–engineer here. After 15 years building products [1] ,from scrappy side projects to multibillion-dollar platforms, I’ve found the most productive way to think about design is as a growth accelerant. The OP reaches a similar insight but keeps it in the realm of product development. That framing is precisely where the friction between engineering and design tends to arise. Design isn’t about making the code look nicer... it’s the bridge between engineering execution and business growth.

Take Dropbox’s much-debated rebrand. Many on HN dismissed it as superficial. What they missed is that Dropbox’s growth had plateaued. The new visual language wasn’t meant to "improve the product" for existing power users. it was engineered to make the product feel approachable to an audience the company had never reached. It worked.

When designers focus on the measurable business impact of their work—and engineers stop treating design as a decorative afterthought—cross-functional frictions fade and growth compounds.

[1] https://fairpixels.pro

I trust software more if it's ugly. Desktop software interfaces were pretty much solved by the late 90s. The majority of changes since then have been aimed at either dumbing down the software to better appeal to people who are easily manipulated and exploited, or just change for the sake of change so designers can justify their jobs. And I choose to avoid mobile devices because every one of them is slow and frustrating compared to using a keyboard and mouse.

I believe modern UI designers provide me negative value on average. Ugly software is a good sign because tells me no designer was there to ruin it.

This is the type of twaddle that I have come to expect from “designer” types. Constant boosterism and exhortations to respect their craft. And when left to practice said craft, the majority of the actual work product is visionary PPTs for execs and a pile of figma screens that barely cover the happiest of happy cases.

Sad thing is that I very much agree with the importance of design. But practitioners seem often insecure, inward looking and unconcerned about whether their dreams are actually workable. But they will talk your ear off about the “texture” of a font.

And then that assertion may be shattered when they get to use it…

There’s a lot of nice looking crap out there.

Oh, inevitably for a blog, this is about web site design.

Confidence in manufactured physical objects is more interesting. Discuss.

Raymond Loewy on a good day - The Honeywell Round.[1] The standard little round thermostat. It's still manufactured.[1]

Raymond Loewy on a bad day - the first attempt to make a steam locomotive look streamlined by adding a sheet metal body.[3] This bad idea caught on in the UK, for some reason, resulting in a whole series of difficult to maintain locomotives. Eventually he designed the look of an electric locomotive, the GG-1, which was very successful, looked very good, and had good access to the important working parts.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig...

[2] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/the-round-non-...

[3] https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...

Ironically, I instantly didn't trust this essay as I scanned it. The design and photo at the end confirmed my mistrust.

The absurdity of the use of beauty in the descriptions of designs, code and equations is as absurd as telling me, who is certainly not a beauty, that there are clear personal defects and deficits because of that property, or lack of that property.

This can join the absurdity of the websites that proclaim _Made with love_.

Marketing nonsense that has nothing to do with functionality, utility, usability may certainly be useful for marketing, promotion, and leveraging nostalgic pangs, but let’s remember that these are usually vacant, sometimes deceptive and often inaccurate.

The deception of beauty and its insidious insertion into many different fields does little to advance those fields and detracts from accuracy, improvement and inevitability reality.

The sweet spot is of course having function actually follow form. Very often this is where the whole thing breaks - good design, poor implementation.

That's a problem for products that have been vibe coded to the bone. They may look slick, but behind the scene they can be ugly and fragile.

well, I have a parking timer installed in the windshield of my car, and it has a 'universally hailed' beautiful design.

It is an obnoxious hassle to replace the batteries on it, and equally so set the clock on it.

So, should I trust thus beautiful design to not be a hassle in daily use..? I long for an ugly parking timer that is easy to use, but those have been driven out of the market by this beauty.

I have to agree with the article. IMO, the importance of design/aesthetics is beyond absurd and people have become laughably rigid. Design used to be about creativity, but now it's basically a boring data-driven science; there isn't much room for error. Rounded corners on your components could make the difference between a failed business and a multi-million dollar business. Or maybe a few fade-in animations...

I wish I was joking but I've had so many experiences where I built something with a ton of features with a perfect, bug-free UI and simple/clean design but people are like "The UI is basic" but then after spending just a few hours restyling, people will say "This is cool." It's the exact same UI, just a few more rounded corners and animations is all it takes sometimes.

As a developer, sometimes you spend days wiring complex logic together and the user gives you an apathetic shrug... Then you spend 5 minutes adding rounded corners and a subtle drop shadow and then it's like 'WOW, such a good feature', you code fast!

I've witnessed people dump perfectly functioning, great looking websites for more boring but trendy designs with less flexible functionality, more lock-in and higher costs. Design is important to an absurd extent.

Frankly, I don't like modern design trends, it's very information-scarce with huge fonts... Requires so much scrolling, makes my fingers and eyeballs tired from moving back and fourth! Also, I lose my train of thought before I finished reading the first paragraph.

I tried using Microsoft Windows OS after a few years of Linux and was surprised to find that the UI elements were just so massive, it was like trying to read a book through a keyhole! I was wondering WTF happened. It was like a scene out of planet of the apes!

The sad thing about it is that people have very little tolerance for creative designs nowadays; it's very boring/standard. I've seen more than a few memes going around about how logos of major companies have all become the same: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Finsightcre...

It's kind of disturbing. This feels like a systemic issue. I guess people have major trust issues. They have zero tolerance for anything slightly outside of the norm. You have to wonder what about our system makes people so universally distrusting... Well I think I may know the answer to that.

if beauty is objective, why his website looks so bad?