Should User Interfaces be "Sexy"

Question

This is a question I both loathe and respect depending on where it comes from. Its not a question of effective interface design, but rather 'should the UI be a strong selling point for the software product'?

This question impacts project planning, design and over-all cost. However you will not find many ergonomic or "sexy" requirements in formal product development specs. Can the sex appeal of software even be captured in a spec document? I doubt it.

I read an interesting thread on The Human Capitalist discussing this very topic and would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Sales people will tell you that a "sexy" UI (whatever that actually is) will sell a product every time. And indeed this it quite often true if you're not selling to the actual User, but to an Exec that will never actually use the product. Often, these decision makers equate a flashy interface with functionality. Sad but true.

Over the last 2 years I have been asked to work on sexing up many products that are failing to sell. They are great products but are starting to look old when run on newer platforms such as Vista or when compared to other products that have a 'ribbon bar' or something similar.

So, does the UI have to be "sexy" in order to sell? If not then just how do you sell functionality over UI sex? How much of a priority is the UI design?

Answer 1

In this day and age absolutely!

People expect a high standard of quality from software these days and the UI is the most visible part of the app and people will think that if you skimp on the UI, you must also be skimping on the technical areas.

In the 21st century you can no longer get away with clunky interfaces.

Answer 2

If you are expecting to sell a tool, then, yes, I would say it would be a business requirement of your own.

A UI, however, should be intuitive. This is more important than 'sexy'

For example, think of the first time you tried to find a File menu in the new Office Suite.

There was a very sexy shiny Windows icon in the top left of your UI, however, I for one spent a week before I realised I just needed to click it to do a Save As operation.

Answer 3

It depends on your customers.

If your customer is a large business or an enterprise which values function over form, "sexy UI" is unnecessary and might be an overhead cost that they won't care to pay for.

However if your customer is the youth/yuppie demograph, or artists, a "sexy UI" might help to sell the product.

On the otherhand, the important lesson here is that you should know how to recognize cool and sexy UI from a usable UI. Whether you are presenting the client with a barely graphical interface or one loaded with whizbang animations, the bottomline is that the UI has to be easy to figure out and work with.

I suspect that the software your sales people are selling may have sexy UI but are missing that usability element, hence the reason they fail to sell their product.

Answer 4

As long as it's functional and easy to use and doesn't end up looking horrible to everyone but you, then sure, go nuts.

Answer 5

If you're talking about adding a drop shadow or skinning all your buttons to look like candy, then "sometimes". If you mean reorganising things to better convey the important information, then "hells yes".

You should never sell functionality over UI. Software doesn't exist to provide "functionality". It exists to achieve results, and to get information out of computers into the heads of people. Any design that helps these is not only a good idea, it should be the top priority.

And unless you're skinning your UI by hand to look like windows 3.1, any UI that helps people achieve their goals can't help but be sexy. But keep in mind, the UI isn't just what you look at - it's the flow, it's the key bindings, it's the explorability, it's how easily the user can copy/paste useful information, it's the entire thing.

To schrodinger's-catify it: If something can be observed by the user, it's part of the UI. UI is the only thing that sells non-batch software.

Answer 6

I think that one should look no further than Microsoft's Ribbon.

As a CS student with a good background in design I often find User Interface design and Human Computer Interaction to be a fascinating subject. More often than not programmers just don't get it. More often than not those programmers that really understand design have put a lot of thought and effort into realising what actually works, including what looks good.

Whilst many people loathe the new Office changes I love them. I think the whole concept looks fantastic, but on top of that it works extremely well! Once you've spent enough time with Office 2007 you find simple things like creating a table are easy. It was a bold move by Microsoft that leaves a lot of questions open about conformity, but I'm sure within time it'll pay off.

To answer the question; Yes! User Interfaces should always look as good as possible. More often than not the best UI is the one that is as simple as possible and fits in with the rest of the applications used from day-to-day.

Much like with a woman or man, we care about conformity. Would you want to have sex with Jessica Alba/Brad Pitt if he/she had the body of a horse?

Answer 7

Natural human instict - we tend to judge a book by its cover. When i see something thats attractive and that stands out, I tend to give it my attention. The same goes for software, the first impression people will have, will be based on its looks. Once you have peoples' attention, then hopefully you have a suit of rich functionality behind the pretty interface. Its not the most important thing, but a pretty interface can aid a richer more pleasant user experience.

Answer 8

'Sexiness' is definitely important but you don't want it at the cost of usability. Fancy interfaces that are hard to use can't remain popular for long.

Once your UI is usable, however, do NOT ignore the value sexiness can add to it. You'll be surprised.

Answer 9

At a recent international trade exhibition the same product was shown on 2 different booths. One was in the original form, from the original manufacturer and the other booth demonstrated the product using a very nice Silverlight skin. Both had different names and no relationship was advertised.

The reaction from almost all of the execs who attended was extremely positive for the Silverlight version and totally dismissive for the original, as an ugly product.

The interesting thing is that the product was 100% SOA and none of the show attendees represented actual Users or attempted to use the products. The original product makers focused on functionality whilst the skinned company focused on UI at the show.

This case demonstrated that functionality was not much of a consideration in the product decision making as the major talking point was the UI amongst prospective buyers.

Answer 10

I loathe the idea of the "sexy" user interface. Too many managers want "sexy" to mean rounded edges, non-rectangular controls, drop shadows, alpha blending, etc. They don't mean it to be intuitive, well laid out and easy to use.

I left a job recently where the UI was supposed to be "sexy". It was supposed to have all the sex before the requirements were even discovered. They got a graphic (not a UI) designer in to design all these fancy bitmaps, printed them in marketing material and started selling the vapourware with these insane UIs in it.

I'm not saying I couldn't have built that UI, but the product was enormous. It included GPS, maps, payment gateway, integration with mobile phone systems (for generating pre-paid credit tokens), etc. It was NOT a small project, and it was under-estimated before I even started there. Adding the horrendous (ie, hard to use, but oh so shiny) interface was the straw that broke this camel's back.

To top it all off, the product was expected to have the shiny UI before it even had a single line of backend code. That meant a shitload of wasted time every time the graphic designer came up with a new screen (because the requirements changed daily) - I needed to jury rig the new screen in so they could "See" how it would look. Go figure. Suffice to say I wrote tens of thousands of lines of interface code and tens of lines of backend code in six months.

Focusing on shiny UIs causes way too much wasted time. Get the UI usable and tidy then build the backend. If there's time make it prettier, but not until the system is built and stable.

Answer 11

Consider Microsoft Word with all its functionality, but the interface replaced with the worst VB-form-ific CS101 slacker mess imaginable.

Do you seriously believe Word would have a reportable marketshare?

I spent six months on a product designing it to be clever, efficient, and scalable; the front end was little more then a pile of printfs (it was a learning experience, and I was frequently tearing out piles of code, so building an interface for some code that might be gone tomorrow was just silly). The client was less then thrilled. A day's worth of styling, and suddenly the project was fantastic - why had I spent six months doing nothing?

Is it Joel that has the blog entry about progressively replacing placeholder graphics in the UI as the code improves, to simulate the effect for those uninitiated in code?

Answer 12

Indeed, the UI should be a strong selling point for a product. The selling point should be that the UI is easy and intuitive to use, not that it is sexy (in the flashy sense of the word). No amount of chrome and shine on a bad UI will help sell software expect in the very short term. After your first set of customers peel away the facade they will see how poor your product is and very likely stop paying you for it and advise others to not waste their time with your company. What's the point of a shiny new application if the user has no clue on how to use those pretty features that marketing has been touting?

Superficial sexiness will get your foot in the door, but clean, thoughtful usability will keep the bills paid for the long term. The users of your software should barely notice if it is sexy or not; only that that they are productive or having a fun time. Good functionality lasts forever; glamor fades and is eventually forgotten.

Can sex appeal be captured in a spec? Why not? A comprehensive spec should include the desired "attractiveness components," and the software design should be flexible enough to swap out those parts during (and even after) development until there is a satisfactory result (and believe me, they will need to be swapped out constantly if your graphic designers are as fickle as mine!). But the usability should always come first. If you let the sexy requirements rule, then you will paint yourself into a corner and your product will do poorly. I think it is important to note that an application can be made attractive by simply "accessorizing" the UI. The good use of color, a reasonable selection of fonts, a subdued background, a snazzy splash/intro screen and good visual flow along with great usability makes any application very sexy... assuming the application is usable to being with.

Answer 13

UIs can be sexy even if they are command line based. It all depends on the end user, more specifically, on the technical level they expect the product to perform. Forcing a developer to use a Silverlight glossy client to configure their build scripts is not sexy at all. Delivering a raw table of data to a manager is useless without some sort of syntetic chart. Scientific software without "soft" array manipulation and precise graphing, will be doomed.

What I mean to say is that beauty can be found in the most spartan UIs. And the less technical the product, the greater the chance it will be mostly superficially appreciated.

Answer 14

Well i believe it should. As in today's iphone type age, interface sells.

This is probably why OS like unix & linux doesn't appeal to normal users. And why an upgrade isn't much of any upgrade unless they change the interface too.

Even previously when i was a non programmer i would love to install the latest version of software for trial and only to be disappointed when it looks exactly the same :P

In fact i think Jeff had a recent blog about this.

Answer 15

Of course, almost everything these days is sold by the way it looks, and it's image. Everything is judged by its outside. Just read a car-blog, if a new car is released all people care about is the way it looks. And that goes for a lot of consumer goods.

People also assume that the quality of the outside reflects the quality of the inside. If the outside is ugly, the inside cannot be much better: if you cut corners on the looks, you probably also cut corners on the functionality. To many people, an ugly outside is just a warning for an overall bad product.

Biggest problem is that people have different opinions of what a good/sexy outside is.

Answer 16

I think aesthetics makes the product very attractive to new customers. Something that's useful to the business (through efficiency, lowered support/training costs, or whatever) is what keeps a product in use by the business.

What is aesthetically pleasing is very subjective. I believe that people with very low technical literacy love things that look sharp, while people with very high technical literacy find form that follows function to be 'sexy'.