To interact with this page you must login.
Signup
technology
advice
What role does visual aesthetics play in a web service's immediate and long-term success?
Craigslist is a great example of a site that has managed to remain relevant, despite a lackluster overall look. Sites like digg and Gawker suffered pretty significantly after their redesigns, which arguably focused on features and left the overall look intact. I know research has been done by usability experts (Tractinsky, Lavie, etc) that has said that visual aesthetics deserves more attention than HCI experts have given it in the past, but is it possible that they are misinterpreting their results and are actually wrong? Could it be true that functionality and a few other non-aesthetic factors are the only important components in determining a web service's success and everything else is relatively insignificant in comparison?
technologyadvice
When I talk about marketing, I mean advertising and whatever else marketing includes besides that, such as branding. Branding is a form of marketing, as it's how you market something,
I get the idea from the OP that they want to understand why websites with a bad design can still get approval (Craiglist), whereas others don't (Gawker).
This is because it's not about the execution, it's about the marketing.
Gawker's design is marketed for tablets, and unfortunately we use computers, not laptops. That means that Gawker is marketing their product bad. Craiglist's design is marketed not to be pretty, but to be simple and get the job done. That's what it does, and its marketing portrays that. That's why the design works, even though it's not nice. Designs don't have to be nice in order to work.
Marketing = Advertising Demographic Engagement Branding Customer Service ???
It's not about how well your idea is executed. If it was, Craigslist and eBay would have been triumphed ages ago.