When should design trump usability? Can a pretty site be a little less usable if it’s extra beautiful? Or is that always a no-no?

In traditional desktop applications, it’s a common rule of thumb to not hide functionality behind things such as right-click menus, but to expose them more generally through a top level menu or toolbar. Sometimes in web design, web sites themselves can have a learning curve. It may not be immediately apparent how a site works or what to click on. Its learnability may be a little lower in order to accommodate a slicker design. The web site simply becomes less intuitive. Hyperlinked images start looking like regular images and text hyperlinks start looking like regular text until the mouse rolls over it. That’s negative points in the world of user experience.

The actual level of usability needs to be considered too. Preferably your web site is not just usable, but competitively usable. Users should prefer to use your website rather than someone else’s. Since the iPhone has been out a while now, some people have come to realize that on-screen keyboards aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Even though it is beautiful to behold…

you just can’t beat the tactile response of a hardware keyboard…

So when do you go with usability rather than a beautiful design? Or is beauty sometimes enough to compensate for a less than stellar user experience?

Never assume that the user will never encounter your crazy error condition. "I’ll put this in a message box for me to see it" is what you might think. "They’ll never see this in the field" is a tempting thought. But then your users might end up seeing something like this:

I can see a line number from a C++ file and some variables being printed to the screen, but what am I supposed to do with that? Is this error bad enough that I should reboot? Should I tell the vendor? Ok, now which application actually popped this error? Was it a browser? Outlook? or maybe Vista itself? I really have no clue. And if my mom ever got this error, she’d be even more lost than me.

So even though you’re sure that the error condition in your if-else block will never happen and there’s no way the user will ever see it, just remember this blog post.