You can have:
- products with horrible UIs and horrible graphic design, but awesome user experience (UXs) -- because they solve a problem perfectly while enabling a good workflow, or are extensible and adaptable to new unanticipated workflows
- products with horrible graphic design but great UIs -- if the user flow is intuitive and productive, the interface responsive and discoverable, it really doesn't matter how shit looks
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX -- the UI may be both intuitive and awesomly designed and responsive... but if it enables wrong or sub-optimal workflows more than the right ones, nudging users towards bad mindsets/perspectives/workflows, it lowers everyone's productivity and sooner or later people will realize that they are dragged down or disabled by that product with the "great" UI
So yeah... if what I wrote above ain't obvious to you, then don't focus on UX, because you'll actually do it wrong anyway. Focus on the problem you solve, on the product you develop to solve it, and on selling the solution. If the UX is not extremely bad or you're not in a "fashion/fad" driven niche, it will probable be ok despite suboptimal UX if you do the rest right.
Also, can you cite some examples of the list of products?
I can think of
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX: Shopping cart checkouts that if you click something, you have to write the CC/Name-details again. Multi-city flight search on any major travel site is a pain in the ass.
Yeah, getting to a good definition of UX vs. UI that everyone could agree on would be great ;)
I'd start with UX defined as "what the users actually ends up doing while using your UI, the actually followed user journeys, the workflows they lead to, all this from the user's subjective perspective (hence the 'experience' part)". Also relating all this to goals and talking about "conversion" etc. would be about UX. And the general feeling of "this really helped me get the job done" that the user gets after using something. Heck, even customer-service can be part of UX if your product does something so complex that having users regularly and often interact with customer service is part of the "regular usage pattern" (think stuffs where CS is not just where you complain, but where you may have talks with reps about "special shipping and assembly arrangements" etc.)
And UI would be "what and how can the user possibly do with your interface, what are the actual interface elements that actually dictate these "how" and "what" of the user's actions, things like responsiveness, intuitiveness (matching user's previous expectations), information density, discoverability". So you can talk about "user satisfaction/enjoyment" here, about "intuitiveness" etc. (but these don't necessarily mean 'higher conversion' or making the user more productive!) Also accessibility comes here. And think things like "is this button big enough to be tapable" or "it that option in hover-only menu that is impossible to access on mobile devices" or "is that other thing a keyboard only shortcut that tablet users will likely miss" etc. These are obviously independent form how things look: the design can be horrible, but everything can be easy to find/tap/click etc.
Graphic design is obviously "how things look" and this also affect the "how easy is to find things", to it does affect both UX and UI... but, there is a big "but" here: designs that receive awwards and are perceived as beautiful tend to have functionality harder to find, and more confusing user journeys. Think about the "ghost buttons" that people used and still use... but have been proven to decrease conversion quite a lot! ...but now the trend might have reverse because users are finally getting used to them. Like, do you really want to be playing this fashion game that can hurt conversions when you don't expect it in a resource constrained startup?! If you're Apple, you can "reeducate users' aesthetic tastes" and stuff which is cool, but you're not Apple. So better under-design a bit just to be safe :)
Thank you for articulating this point so well. I think websites like HN, 4Chan to an extent Reddit are best examples for this category
I LOVE HN's design.
That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected, or drawing areas where they shouldn't be, etc.
It's almost like if some people wanted to screw over their customers on purpose. But, I guess, it's more of people who don't know what they're doing selling things to people who don't know how to use them.
The intersection of those too groups is too small to make any difference, thus tools will be heavily optimized for one of those.
http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...
Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched.
If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now).
Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many, many front-end engineers and UX designers, and Wikipedia, Reddit, HN as well as old-school Gmail and FB start looking amazing.
Man oh man do I miss old Gmail... that was a great interface. I exclusively use FB on mobile, no-js mode.
Web brutalism should be the new hotness.
I'm quite tired of not being able to use sites on slow connections.
I guess Gmail brought it to the masses, along with a decent amount of free storage.
In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.
You can't launch Craiglist in 2017 though. I know that there are numerous exceptions from the 00s and even from the App Store 5-6 years ago. But it's not the same anymore because blue oceans are rare nowadays.
That's what I've used in the UK and Australia, an ebay own it too.
However, for all these projects, the UI may be relatively primitive, but the UX is outstanding because it's stripped to exactly the things the user needs to accomplish what they're trying to do.
LastPass killed it because they had Enterprise grade features people wanted. I totally agree with you. It's about building a product for your customers
All the comments disagreeing with this seem to be talking about "big" companies like Reddit. Think more IBM. OP's comment is very accurate.
And the 'core feature set' can be intangible features of the company, such as brand.
Why is that fact relevant? Care to elaborate?
This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly.
In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.