strategic importance of ugly design

We all strive for beauty in design and avoid ugliness like the plague. But this discriminative attitude is dangerous. After all, the duty of a designer is to produce effective design and effectiveness is not solely an aesthetic matter.

Let me highlight some instances where deliberate use of ugliness can have strategically important payoffs.

Inducing Alertness

Beautiful design is like a straight road stretching across a vast desert. The experience is so smooth that it eventually puts you to sleep. Just as road planners deliberately insert curves into such routes, designers can employ incoherent elements to awaken users. Like dissonant musical chords, such elements create moments of disharmony whose subsequent resolutions put the user back onto the regular flow.

Drawing Attention

Ugliness in an otherwise beautiful composition draws immediate attention. That is why ugly banners on clean websites convert really well and small imperfections on beautiful faces are so memorable. Remember Cindy Crawford’s mole? Of course, you do.

Increasing Recall Rates

While beauty arises from a complex combination of factors, ugliness is usually due to a few factors and therefore is easier to analyse and remember. Literally anyone can articulate the reasons behind an ugly appearance, but decoding the speechlessness of a beautiful scene requires a poet-level mastery of words.

Mediating Differentiation

There are a lot more ways of failing to be beautiful than being beautiful. One obvious example of this comes from symmetry considerations: There are literally infinitely many ways of breaking a symmetry, but only a few ways of preserving it. When a composition feels too generic due to excessive use of symmetry, a designer has no choice but to take some risk and override the most fundamental principle of aesthetics.

Signalling Cheapness

Display windows of high-end fashion stores have minimalistic outlooks and no price tags, while those of low-end stores have cluttered configurations and huge discount tags. Similarly, an e-commerce website targeting a low-income audience should look as cheap as the goods it has for sale. Visitors will only stay on a website if they think it is meant for them.

Signalling Functionality

“They are boxy, but they are good. Be safe instead of sexy.” used to be the punchline of an old legendary ad campaign of Volvo. We instinctively know that total perfection is unattainable. So when a company admits defeat on one ground, we are more likely to believe their claimed superiority in another. Volvo sacrificed aesthetics in favour of functionality. We do not know whether this trade-off was necessary but it certainly sounds natural.

Filtering Out Noise

Ugliness can act like a wall of deterrence. A closed community may prefer to keep their online forums look outdated and unwelcoming so that only genuinely interested visitors bother to sign up. Conversely, beautiful people frequently have trouble filtering out partners who are only in it for sex.

Shortening Visit Durations

It is nice to hang out inside beautifully crafted physical spaces. A chic hotel lounge makes your wait as joyful as possible. But what if your business depends on a heavy circulation of people and you need visitors to leave your place as soon as possible? Well, you opt for an optimally ugly interior design. Restaurants catering to local businesses tend to have such vibes.

Catalysing Identity Formation

Deliberate ugliness can be a statement in and of itself. There is probably no other way of offending everyone in a more visible and harmless way than by an outright rejection of traditional artistic values. Punk movement was a good example of this.

Being Futuristic

Flat design is cool today, but would have been abhorred ten years ago. To a certain extent ugliness is about timing. Put in other words, ugliness can actually be a sign of being ahead of the times. Innovation requires experimentation and experimentation always involves venturing outside the accepted set of standards.