Why web designers are over-rated
Wired did a competition inviting designers to improve craigslist.
As you can see, most designs actually decrease the functionality of Craigslist under the pretense of "making it beautiful" or "making it a webapp".
It is possible to do three clicks in the current craigslist design in the time it will take for the home page of these so-called new designs will load. (so much for saving clicks)
Just another data point on why most Web 2.0 products end up making it no money (too much focus on cool design. too little on value for users).
1 comment
Oct 15, 2009
Avinash said...
There is a great deal of focus on Usability practices b4 actually getting to UXD these days. It is always when users give live feedback more iterations happen which is natural as no survey from the every start can predict everything although it does minimize the damage. Most of the web 2.0 start ups are low on funds to apply Usability and UXD from the very start and thus have to fall back later to re-design things although ROI is known to these blokes if usabiity is done from the very start but I guess most of these small ideas die under the pressure of getting some revenue or to attract some funding with a decent user base with the help of a cool shick designer and the functional flows are overlooked there.
