Why Don’t We Question Popular Designs?

If you’ve been active on the online web design community, reading articles and what not, for longer that a few months, you’ve likely heard people talk about Craigslist. Specifically, the design of Craigslist.

Designers everywhere are amazed about how popular and often-used the site is given the amazingly simple and some would say, unusable design. The fact remains that it is one of the most oft-visited sites on the web, regardless of its design and usability (or lack thereof).

Even the source code is dated! Tables for layout, spacer cells, the works! This website goes against everything you are taught about coding practices, design, usability, UX, everything.

However, as much as I’d like to bash on it, Craigslist isn’t the topic of this article. Today I want to talk about how web and print designers alike have a hard time questioning popular design.

What do I mean by popular design? Well…

A popular design is a design that is used and visited a lot, often by designers. I’m talking about sites like Craigslist and YouTube, sites that have such great content, that in reality they could use any design they wanted, and people will still visit it.

For me, YouTube is one such site. I visit it so often, that I get used to its many little quirks. Not that it’s a bad design, it’s just quite simple. When YouTube revealed its new channel design, many cried in outrage. It’s not that it was badly designed, it’s just that it was different, and many didn’t like it.

Eventually, all the buzz died down and people who didn’t like the new layout began to accept that it wasn’t going to change back anytime soon. However, consider someone who’s never been on the internet before. They visit a YouTube channel and for whatever reason decide that they don’t like the layout.

While I’m not sure what percentage of people have never been to YouTube, I’m sure that this situation would be sort of a Surreal experience for a long-time hater of the layout. They’ve long forgotten about it, but here comes along someone who doesn’t know not to trust it. It would be confusing I’m sure.

Alright, time to bring it all together.

Why is it that we have a hard time judging designs that are very popular, or designed by a so-called “rockstar designer?” It’s still a design, and should be treated as such.

Look around you. If you’re reading this on The Design Gnome, then there’s a good chance you don’t like its design. Well neither do I. And I designed it. Soon I will be relaunching The Design Gnome with a different Mascot, and a completely different design. But don’t trust it, because after all, I suck.