I have been bothered with the question “does community site have to be ugly to succeed” for a long time. You see, most of the successful long running community sites are ‘ugly’. Think reddit, hacker news, slashdot or metafilter. On the other side, you have the digg redesign fiasco, although one can argue that whether the strong correlation here equals to cause-and-effect. But it is a fact that Matt, the owner of Metafilter, once redesigned the site to be more ‘web 2.0′ and noticed a significant traffic drop when he A/B tested the new design using live traffic.
Why? Isn’t this against the human nature of appreciating order and beauty? Does it mean that all of our knowledge in fonts, colors or layouts are useless? Or maybe there are something unique about community sites?
The father of wiki, Ward Cunningham, gave a talk about his new wiki idea a couple of months ago. Something he said about the design of wiki finally answered that question for me. Here is what he said:
Someone came up to me and said “the idea of wiki is neat but do they have to be ugly? “. My answer was “yeah, basically they do. Because when you make it beautiful, then anybody that can not match your beauty has been closed out of the conversation. So I say clean and simple. “
It is my belief that each service/product needs to be optimised to serve its core need. The fundamental role a community site performs is a platform to get “fresh and unique thoughts” from its members. Anything else is merely a tool to the end. Counter intuitively, inhibiting the urge to make things visually appealing actually helps to achieve this goal. Because the more attention people devote to tweak their look-and-feel of content, the less time they would spend to make it more intellectually interesting. So accidentally, the ‘ugliness’ of the community site turned out to be a killer feature that helps to keep people focus on talking about their thoughts, even though I bet most sites didn’t start realizing that.
I disagree, for a couple of reasons. And I know that Ward Cunningham is a hard guy to disagree with on wikis, but I’m still going to put it out there.
First, I don’t think that foregoing beauty is equivalent to being ugly. There is beauty in simplicity. So he’s creating a false dichotomy.
Second, when I look at most wikis I think they’re ugly because of the high-level design choices – header elements, style sheets, and the like – which the vast majority of authors have no interaction with. So making your wiki pretty by making good choices in styles and high-level graphic elements has no effect on content creation.
Look at Confluence for an example – it’s easy on the eyes, and has about the lowest barrier to entry of any wiki that I have used as an author or an administrator.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder – what you think is ugly might not seem so to others. Clean and simple, black and white, no juddery or moving images – that is what i think is beautiful, letting the words create the images in my own head. Others may not agree. Fair enough. Don’t judge others on beauty, say I. I don’t find Wiki ugly, no more so than Encyclopaedia Britannica (I have a 1962 edition). Love my encyclopaedia. And my Oxford English dictionaries. Hate some of the fancy science text books with too many coloured photos and no decent index. Leave beauty out of it. Let the designer choose his/her design, say I.