This article was translated by the Mockplus team.

Website: www.mockplus.cn




A pretty web interface can compromise usability, but here are five web interfaces that go to new levels of ugliness. Is it still usable?

The interface design isn’t exactly beautiful, but calculators can help you solve a lot of tricky arithmetic problems while your fingertips fly across the keyboard. Many people deride Crocs shoes for not being aesthetically pleasing, but their comfort makes them the first choice for workers in the healthcare industry. Through these examples, we extend one of the debates between user experience and usability: a product doesn’t have to be beautiful to provide a great user experience.

Let’s take a look at five examples of sites that have horrible UI but great user experience. It is said that form should follow function, but in reality, the two must work together.

Craigslist.

Typing Craigslist into your browser takes you to a web page so dull and undesigned that you might think you’re back in the early 90s. Before entering the site, you might think that in addition to rich website navigation, there are attractive graphic design and appropriate information architecture.




But it is Craiglist’s simplicity and basic qualities that have made the advertising giant so popular. By adopting an unconventional model, Craigslist has maintained a global presence among merchants. But why?

From a user experience perspective, this may be due to cognitive load (or lack of it). It is precisely because the site is so empty that there is a degree of trust and freedom between users. These are important factors when doing business online, and Craiglist’s minimalist approach means users can make decisions on their own time, with no extra distractions.

The Drudge Report

Visit most news sites and you’ll be bombarded with big, eye-catching images and headlines. In this regard, the Draghi report is no different. You’ll see the headlines, you’ll see the pictures, and most importantly, you’ll feel a whole new online experience with minimalism.



Since the Drudge Report was launched in 1996, websites still contain outdated HTML elements. But the Drudge Report is an example of what design is — and it’s not flashy buttons, or eye-catching pictures, or even stunning design. Still, it can be very popular.

What makes the Drudge Report’s ux design special is the freedom to choose what to read. Text, links and headlines are formatted the same for all stories, so there is no cosmetic preference between story and story. This means that users are free to browse the site and choose what they are most interested in reading.

Jason Fried notes that the chaotic presentation of information is almost a newsroom business, which partly explains the drudge Report’s excitement for users.

Reddit(large forum)

This self-proclaimed “home page of the Internet” has some terrible user interfaces. But isn’t the design anything to recommend it? Aesthetics may not be a priority in Reddit’s kanban management, though. But even if the interface is ugly, a lot of the design is still right.



Plenty of space for content. Reddit is driven by user-generated content, which is how the site works, so most of the site is dedicated to the site. This is Reddit’s greatest strength.

Minimalism. This design works in Reddit’s favor — with so much content, it’s almost impossible to create a system that can accommodate so many users. While it may seem a bit crude, simplicity is what makes Reddit so successful.

However, in terms of UI design, these designs are not so bad. If you want to beautify your site’s UI, you can use customizable CSS in your section design.

Wikipedia (encyclopedia)

Wikipedia is also a site that doesn’t have a pretty user interface, but it has a great user experience. In fact, many of the sites mentioned above (including Wikipedia) prioritize functionality. But does the lack of design in the user interface hinder the readability of Wikipedia?



Not really. Wikipedia is accessible to a wide audience because its pages are designed entirely in their own way. If it is decorated with color and too many images, this will not only slow down the page load time, but also make it more difficult for the site to be more attractive. If there’s one thing Wikipedia does well, it’s legibility.

Finally, we need to understand that it’s an encyclopedia, not a dating site, so there’s no need for a fancy UI.

amazon

Amazon has been in the online retail business since the early 1990s, when it started as a humble online bookstore and became one of the world’s tech giants. But its user interface was a bit of a bummer.



Amazon’s use of photo rotation has become a hot topic for many in the USER experience design community. Users can often scroll through the screen through a rota, which is the best way to display products in online stores. However, Amazon overuses the rotation model and typically has three or four rounds scrolling through the home page. The good news is that when we’re doing our own design, we have the option to rotate.

Why isn’t Amazon optimizing its user interface? A small user interface change can cost Amazon millions of dollars, and even if it makes a valuable adjustment, it may not improve the site’s profits or usability. So sometimes when it comes to bad UI, if it doesn’t affect the use of the site, it won’t be fixed.

conclusion

User experience designers must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that an ugly user interface can still lead to a good user experience. While the sites mentioned in this article may be streamlined, that doesn’t necessarily mean their user interfaces are bad. Most of them simply retain the original user interface, which may have been designed for operation only. The site may not give priority to aesthetics, but that doesn’t mean the site is bad or ugly. Review the sites mentioned above – they may have unconventional user interfaces, but that doesn’t affect the millions of visitors they receive every day!


Author: Justinmind

Address: uxplanet.org/when-good-d…