UX Professionals: You are Probably Overly Prioritizing Aesthetics in your Products

Artist: Jeff Axup, “Useless Beauty”, 2023, Medium: Midjourney on pixels.

Summary: UX tends to focus too much on aesthetics and not enough on pragmatism and utility. Many of the most successful products in history were not beautiful, and we would do well to learn what traits are more important to prioritize.

User Experience has a tendency to focus too much on aesthetics and not enough on pragmatism and utility. Many software products have been wildly successful without being very visually appealing. This typically comes as a surprise to members of UX teams with fine-arts, graphic design, print, or marketing backgrounds. The sections below give examples of successful non-beautiful products, analysis of what traits mattered more for them, and some ideas on how UX can focus on more important aspects.

Examples of Successful Non-Beautiful Products

Example 1: Midjourney

• Midjourney is an AI tool to take text prompts and turn them into images. It is wildly popular and users are paying $10/mo or more to use it to generate artistic images. At the time of writing, Midjourney has more than 15 million users which are growing at the rate of almost 100,000 a day. It has little competition at the same quality level.
• From a UX perspective, arguably their interface is both ugly and hard to use. Instead of creating a simple web site with a text prompt field, as most of the LLMs have done, they opted to re-use a chat discussion forum tool called Discord as their front-end and hooked it up to their API.
• This results in a crowded, busy, confusing interface which is not even designed exclusively for the task it supports (see image). It also has a host of usability problems including not allowing free trial usage, a difficult signup process, few instructions on how to get started, crowded servers that mix results from different users, and images results that appear off screen and get lost amongst other people’s creations. It also produces four images when you want one, and doesn’t give many options to iterate on the best option. Their cryptic interface with ‘U1’ and ‘V3’ buttons doesn’t help. Admittedly, the output of the product (images) can be quite beautiful, and this glosses over the problems with the product that produced them.
• Summary: Satisfying compelling use cases for users is more important than having a beautiful product. They have a captive audience of users and a successful product despite the lack of beauty. However, with time competitors are likely to attack their market share with products that produce more accurate images, have more privacy, and have dedicated interfaces that are easier to set up and use.

Midjourney: creating images in the middle of a chat forum.

Example 2: ChatGPT

• ChatGPT is an AI chat tool that has conversations with you and answers questions.
• After launching it reached 1M users in 5 days, faster than any previous product. As of this writing it has over 100M users, and it only launched 9 months ago.
• ChatGPT has an extremely basic and simple interface. It provides a few suggestions for sample queries to get started, a choice of the API version and a list of previous chat sessions for reference. The latter point is crucial because not all of its competitors have it, and enables long-term relationships with users and a memory of progress made on certain topics or projects previously. They also recently added a feature that lets the user specify who they are, what goals they have and how they want to be interacted with. The minimal interface may in part be due to the need for speed when responding to user queries, and the significant time the APIs take to generate responses. See the full UX review.
• Summary: ChatGPT offers a simple functional interface that is both easy to get started with, but also builds a conversational relationship with the user over time. This is not a beautiful interface, but it focuses on rapidly updating the conversation with the user, as well as showing a memory of the conversations that came previously.

ChatGPT: simple and plain interface that gets the job done. It hit 1M users in 5 days.

Example 3: Google

• Google needs no introduction and it is the search engine most of the world uses to find information, news and assistance for a variety of tasks.
• As of this writing it has roughly 4.3B active users. It is arguably one of the most successful products of all time, and it has held its lead for over 20 years.
• As illustrated below, Google has insisted on a minimal interface for the last 20 years. Other search engines have chosen different paths, with tacky animated advertising, new pages, dashboards, and other content conflicting with the primary search task.
• Similarly to ChatGPT, search engines need to think about the time it takes to process the user query and respond. They also need to think about letting the user think without distraction while formulating their query, and then giving them space to process the results and select the next action to take.
• Summary: Google has religiously held to a design philosophy of a simple, largely text-based front page. It focuses almost exclusively on getting the user into a search task, with rapid results. It is also extremely reliable and was one of the first to provide more accurate results and summary answers at the top of search results.

Google search has never been beautiful, but it is very simple and functional. It has also been a huge business success.

Example 4: Windows 95

• Windows 95 built off of some more basic GUI-based versions prior to it and focused on an object-oriented interface that supported multitasking.
• With gray windows and unnecessary chart-junk and skeuomorphism, the design clearly wasn’t prioritizing aesthetics. However, it did have a ‘Start’ button which was very reassuring to novice users who may have been intimidated by computers. It also had screens that were easy to read, help buttons, and a filing system that users already understood from the one they had in their office. It was a boring and administrative interface, but it got the user to their goal of writing a paper and printing it, and other similar tasks.
• Summary: Windows 95 was not beautiful, but it was highly functional and inviting in comparison to users of DOS and unix-based CLI (command-line) systems, which contributed heavily to its success.

Windows was widely adopted and financially successful without being beautiful.

Example 5: Linux

• Linux is an open source OS (operating system) widely used on both servers and also on mobile devices via Android. 96.3% of the top million web servers run Linux.
• Linux is arguably quite ugly, cryptic, difficult to learn, prone to user-error, difficult to troubleshoot and a whole host of other design deficiencies. But it has stood the test of time for some reason.
• Undoubtedly Linux is powerful, and it is also free, which probably explains a large part of its success. However it is also simple in some ways (just enter one command at a time, and only one place on the screen for interactions) and it gets tasks done reliably. It can also be used to set up automation and host web servers, so it becomes a background activity one it is set up. It also has a huge community of developers who continuously make improvements and patch security holes.
• Summary: Despite its cryptic and basic interface, Linux completes a wide range of tasks reliably and predictably. For advanced users it provides a free solution that is more important than a beautiful interface or increased usability levels.

Linux is an OS that has a text based command-line interface which interacts with the user via cryptic commands.

Conclusions and Guidance

Many of the most successful software products in the history of computing have not been beautiful. While beauty is an aspect of good UX it is frequently very low on the priority list relative to other more foundational concepts. Here are some things to consider as Director of a UX group or when making decisions about which activities to fund, staff, or prioritize:

1. Interviews: You are probably asking the wrong questions

• Don’t ask for “where is the beautiful image of the finished product in your portfolio?” It’s not what matters. Experienced UX professionals know that you can’t tell the usability, utility, or successfulness of product by looking at its released front page. Good UX is more than skin deep, and beauty isn’t the primary factor that would make it successful.
• Companies that stress the importance of hi-fi mockups or “comps” aren’t focusing on the things that matter. There is a dumpster bin of failed startups in San Francisco where they wanted image-quality CAD renders and advertising-quality spotlighted comps set into iPad screens, when they should have been looking at sketches. They wasted time and money and ran out of runway. Iterate in flexible mediums and focus on happy path completion instead.
• You should mostly be hiring interaction designers, not graphic designers. Many of the product examples above continue to be a business success and popular with users because of “useful interaction experiences for a target audience”. Interaction design requires an understanding of personas, use cases, journey maps, task flows, mental models, user requirements, customer research, business goals, and how all of this affects architectures and object models. You need to hire people with this skill set.

2. The future isn’t just about GUIs

• There are many different forms of interfaces. Command-line, chat, API, speech, sound, gesture, drawing etc, and those will apply to both input and output in the near future. Looking for visual beauty is literally off-topic or irrelevant in many cases.
• Instead of asking a designer why they chose a certain font you could ask them if they considered the design of the corresponding API or CLI for the same use case — it’s more critical to the success of the product.

3. Workflow and requirements problems will break your product — aesthetics won’t

• I find a lot of companies focusing on downstream details such as visual appearance, “freshness”, keeping up with the latest UI fads, font choices and branding colors. These things are the small variables you can play with easily at the end of the development process if needed.
• The things that can’t be changed later have to do with the underlying architecture you chose, or the use cases you prioritized, or your understanding of target users, or whether users can complete the happy path easily. In short, there are foundational interaction-design and architecture questions that will be set in stone once they are chosen — those are the things you should be focusing on getting right first.

4. Simplicity is not just an aesthetics goal, it is a functional goal

• One thing in common amongst the product successes above is that they all have an element of simplicity, pragmatism, and utility to them. Even Windows 95 was simpler and easier to learn than DOS. Linux is quite complex, but once you know the command, it will reliably do powerful actions with one short line of commands over and over again.
• Interactive-product designers should rarely seek the praise “wow, that is beautiful”. Instead they should seek comments such as “that is the tool I use all the time”, or “that is the tool that is the most useful”, or “that tool is so easy to use.”
• After reading this article you might be inclined to think that “simplicity” is the new overall goal of UX design. That is not entirely wrong, but it is important to look at the root-cause. Why is simplicity important, and what is it doing for the user? The answer is that simplicity lets the user focus on their task, easily make necessary decisions while doing it, and ultimately get to their goal. Simplicity isn’t the goal, it’s the thing that aids them getting to their goal. Some advanced interfaces such as flight control systems or monitoring dashboards need complexity, so that many objects can be compared, or to support 1-click fast access to a large range of necessary actions. Some interfaces that initially look very complex are actually quite usable and optimized for their target users and tasks.

5. Caveats

• Tacky and Ugly Interfaces: Interfaces can be so visually unappealing, busy or distracting that they are a turn-off, and users go elsewhere. Bing Search is a good example of this with lots of images, ads, animation, logins, and un-asked-for content getting in the way of the search activity. Clearly Google had a “simple” design strategy and stuck with it — unlike the competition.

While it has recently gotten better with a calm image background and an attempt to push the ads further down the screen, Bing still offers a tacky interface full of click-bait and distractions. It also forces a log-in before providing any results unlike Google.

• Hardware Products: It could be argued that aesthetics is more important in physical product design. For example when you walk up to an object (e.g. car, robot, phone) and look at it, you might be drawn in, admire it, trust it, or decide to try it out. I would argue that this is part of the product communicating its nature and purpose to would-be users, and that it is less about beauty per-say — so it is still functional design. Also, there are many beautiful products that get returned on Amazon every day because users couldn’t figure out how to use them, or were easily broken, or didn’t solve the user’s problem. In short: aesthetics still isn’t typically the most important variable.
• Graphics-related products: Products that have target personas in the fashion industry, or graphic design space, or gaming, may have justifiable reason to focus more on aesthetics in their tools or things produced using them, because it shows competence in their target industry.
• Late-stage Product Differentiation: It is possible that when a market is flooded with similar products, the only differentiator left is aesthetics. This might make a product stand out from the crowed, or appear more advanced than the competition. Arguably this isn’t entirely accurate or genuine. Customers will likely see through this facade and return products after a few weeks if it doesn’t actually meet their needs, which can be a costly strategy for companies in the long run.

My opinions are my own and not related to any current or past employers. You should make your own life, design and investing decisions. I hope you find my ideas thought-provoking.