We don't need you to design anymore

The value of design increases as the number of users increase.<p>For Amazon, getting a 0.1% increase in revenue from changing the color of a button would be a big deal. If Amazon paid $50k just for that one color change they would still be millions of dollars ahead.<p>For a smaller business a 0.1% change would not be as significant.

The author commits a fallacy by only listing companies that are successful and have bad design and not listing those who were unsuccessful and had bad design.<p>You could make similar arguments about source control, unit testing or bug tracking. Plenty of companies succeed despite not having them and they're not crucial to success but it can make or break in a large amount of marginal cases.<p>Despite that, the article is making an important point and having a conversation I don't see designers having very often.

I'm going to tell you a secret: good design = good usability.<p>Shhhh... don't tell anyone that a gradient or a shiny button doesn't mean having a good design. A good design might be as simple as text over a white page. Good design is about getting out of the way, making the use of the website or application easier and intuitive (and of course making it look good while doing that). Design is about aesthetic and functionality, you can separate them.

From experience, I can tell you that all things being equal, a good design and pleasant usability experience win you business from your competition.<p>My company built its own online quoting and ordering platform from the ground up - Smartpress.com. There are many sites out there that let you buy printing online. Ours is clean, fast, pretty, and gives you instant quotes on all products. I'm not pimping our site, but these features of our platform have won us customers. We know because that is what they tell us. The design attracted them, and equated to conversions.<p>We have our own designers in house, just not web designers. So, we paid good money to a contractor whom we know very well, and worked closely with him. It was worth every penny.

Oh, the many counter-examples:<p>Github &#38; Sourceforge<p>Slashdot &#38; Digg<p>Facebook &#38; MySpace<p>Look at Apple. When they started building their products with interesting, cool designs, they started recovering as a company. I own a Nexus One because it's a better phone, but the iPhone outsells it because it's more slick to own one.<p>Design does matter. Especially if you do it right. A really stellar website markets itself.

Zappos.com has the largest footer because they sell shoes. Get it? Foot? Shoes? ....please don't downvote me.

Weird. This took forever to load, caused Chrome to crash, then my computer blue screened. Probably just a local problem..but did anyone else get weird loading behavior in Chrome at least?<p>edit: loads up in firefox 3.6 no problem. I'm on windows 7 64bit.

Is web design becoming a commodity? In some cases it has been for a while, but like all professionals, a good designer will learn new skills and adapt to the changing world - like crazy jquery kung fu or iphone samurai.

I appreciate the blog / opinion content on HN when it's well written, or written by a credible source. This fails on both levels.

s/opinion/spit-test/g