A: Undecided.
Plurk vs Twitter
My background is design and I would like to think that the answer is yes but there are success stories out there that make me question the importance of design as one of the ingredients in a recipe for success. I have just read Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage, but I’m not sure that the UI is an advantage. Yes Plurk is beautiful to look at but then Twitter isn’t ugly, is it? So how much has Plurk’s design impacted on its take-up?
Traffic for Plurk and Twitter
Not much. Although, another interesting question would be: how many other similar concepts have launched and made no impact at all due to being bad-to-average in the design area? Plurk’s design certainly caused some ripples of attention which have contributed to its current level of success, but I’m sure there are more successful sites in a similar micro-blogging arena to Twitter and Plurk. Take FriendFeed, it’s pretty minimal in design terms, it features a horrible bevel and stroke effect on the buttons but it’s doing slightly better than Plurk. Its recent popularity has certainly been helped by the TechCrunch coverage of Twitter’s downtime, but is has flourished in spite of its design.
I can say the same thing about Amazon, let’s face it, it’s a pretty horrible looking site, functional, but horrible. They have millions of dollars to spend on their design and that’s precisely why it looks the way it does – it’s not an accident, it’s not because they don’t have a design team, it’s not because the design was thrown together by some programmer “who designed his mum’s site once”, it’s deliberate. Equally, you only need to visit MySpace and you know you are about experience the worst bout of visual diarrhea you have ever had, but users continue to lap it up!
Based on the above examples, you would have to conclude that [graphic] design is not a solution to popularity. Neither is bad [graphic] design a barrier to entry. So for the time being A: Undecided.
2 responses so far ↓
Matt Strange // July 31, 2008 at 2:06 pm |
In some niches the design matters, look at facebook, the design is pretty simple and we could of all thought of it lol, simple sites work, so the design is important in some ways.
designbuildreview // July 31, 2008 at 2:22 pm |
Ok, so how do you explain MySpace? Bad design was not a factor in their success. (when I say design, I mean graphic design, rather than app/function design).