UI: nice look vs distinctiveness and branding

13 points

15 years ago

I've been designing web interfaces for the last ten years, and now that I'm working on my own startup, I face critical UI decisions. I spent the last hour bouncing here and there on dribbble, pointing the eyes on beautiful examples of UI design. What I see, anyway, is an incredible similarity of styles. There is a dominant, yet beautiful, way to design user interfaces and components, but it terribly lacks distinctiveness. What recently happened with Twitter for Mac and the mail client Sparrow is iconic of what I mean: user interfaces are becoming incredibly similar to each other. This is probably good for users, because similar UIs means a shorter learning curve. But is it good for branding?

When I surf websites like dribbble, I feel this terrible temptation of approving myself to the dominant mass, but than I think: what about branding? Branding is all about distinctiveness, and distinctiveness in UI has a key role in influencing brand awareness, particularly when talking about websites. When I look at web apps like mint.com, posterous or even Facebook, I see great examples of designs with a brand behind, with a great ability of being recognizable.

What I ask myself, then, is if a less nice-looking and more distinctive UI design is what I should focus on. I know, I know what's in your mind now: nice look and distinctiveness can simply live together, this is obviously true. But the real question is: what to sacrifice? What to focus on?

9 comments

9 comments