The Value of Good Design

I have noticed up on Usability Post this fantastic article about the value of good design, and more specifically good website design and it outlines the simple points about how good design and created clear leaders online, one fantastic example of this is the myspace and facebook debate, myspace was the clear leader a few years back, facebook came into the space with amazing design and usability, which ultimately lead them to leading the race.

Take the case of Facebook. Facebook wasn’t always the top social network — that place belonged to MySpace. What happened? I believe the reason for Facebook’s growth lies in large part to its design. If you compare the two sites, it’s pretty obvious which one has a better design. Not just the way it works or the way it looks — both of these things are much better on Facebook’s side. It has been like this from the start.

MySpace offered its users a way to personalize their pages. The result: an incoherent mess. Facebook had a clean, minimalist design from the very beginning. It oozes order. Facebook is clarity and order to MySpace’s chaos, and I think a whole lot of people prefer this. This doesn’t mean MySpace somehow fails — it just means Facebook are utilizing good design as a competitive edge.

By Dmitry Fadeyev From Usability Post