Functionality vs. aesthetics: Why a beautiful shell can be detrimental to your product

I was in professional design consulting for 10 years (at IDEO), where I observed hundreds of user interviews and feedback sessions about our designs. I can't tell you how many times I had designed a "cool" UI that did something clever, only to have users hate it and prefer the simpler, more straightforward version. I worked on a physical therapy app about 5 years ago, and I prototyped a vertical video swiping system like TikTok, where the videos could collapse horizontally into a numbered list. It felt a little like using the iOS app switcher, but vertically. All the designers loved it. When we put it in front of physical therapy patients, they tore it apart. They overwhelmingly picked a far simpler horizontal card format. Design is how it looks, but it's also how it works. Once you nail the functionality and interactions that make sense to your user, you can focus on making them look amazing!

It's not that simple...I think both are important and should be intertwined. I believe a useful design (i.e. Google search) will always get returning visitors even if it's ugly (i.e. Craigslist), however a beautiful design will always have deeper psychological effects that will make people believe they are more usable and instill other positive associations. As a designer, I suffer from the aesthetic-usability bias. I'd rather use Cosmos.so than Pinterest, or IG rather than TikTok (it's not only a generational choice, but an aesthetically biased choice). This doesn't apply to everyone, it's just my personal view. Some psychological effects that influence and explain this are: + The Picture-Superiority Effect + The Halo Effect and the + Aesthetic-Usability Effect So, more beautiful products are perceived as more usable even if they aren't, and I dare to add that they look (in my mind) more trustworthy. For example, I'd rather enroll in a University with a website that displays huge, high quality images/video, a solid branding and show the campus, rather than one that's loaded with walls of text and tiny pictures. I also think that we give more grace to beautiful products, like Apple products are so aesthetically pleasing that we can easily overlook their flaws (like having to switch chargers for each new version of a macbook or iphone). Maybe it's just me. Here' an interesting read on the subject from the UI versus UX perspective, assuming UX is synonymous with usable: https://flyingbisons.com/blog/th....