Interesting post at Bob Bly's blog. "Does Ugly Sell?"

bly.com blog » Does Ugly Design Sell Best?

(Read my comment. It's the 2nd one there.)

I'm sure Subtle has something to say about this...

By the way, I believe he's referring to this article:

http://www.grabinerhall.com/press_pdf/common_sense.pdf

(Go to the subhead entitled "General Advertising Agencies and Design Firms Can’t Do Direct Marketing, And vice versa" by Robert C. Hacker.)

I don't think ugly is the appropriate term. There are ugly sites, there are OK sites, and there are beautiful sites. OK sites and beautiful sites will outsell ugly sites all day, I would put most marketing websites(found here in signatures) as OK sites. They service the purpose and look nice, clean, and get to the point. An example of an ugly site would be Association Of International Glaucoma Societies............AIGS............ Now, I don't care how much marketing you put on that site when people go there they will not be able to push the back button quick enough.

I would love to do a real test on this, once I get some free time maybe I will work with a copywriter from this board and design 3-4 different sites and test them all at once.

I would rephrase it to say message to market match sells. For example, you don't see TV infomercials getting plainer.

Another explanation for the same result: people don't test graphics. Or at least, they don't test graphics with the same rigor text is. Most graphics are purely decorative, and many of the people (graphic artists) who would be in a position to develop information resist testing.

Read Why Your Site Doesn't Need to be Pretty. The Petco example is not about an "uqly" version beating a "pretty" version. Rather it is a more effective look. I doubt, putting the two versions side-by-side, anyone could say for sure which was "prettier."

Check with me on this, I would also be interested in some well thought out tests. I'm talking about advertorial style sites: infographics, diagrams, etc. There's a thread here with some nice examples, but again they are not the sites most graphic artists (or most marketing firms) turn out.

All I know is I've had clients routinely double and triple conversions by making their sites look 'pretty' in a specific way.

and One of my own websites is converting at close to 4% on first time visitors.

Can't argue with results.

Well, like I said in my comment on Bly's blog is, "what looks 'ugly' to an ad agency is different than what looks 'ugly' to a consumer." And I believe the article referenced is stating "ugly" in agency terms. That is, "simple" versus "fancy-shmancy, bright-colored, high-gloss, brand-bulldozing" design.

We just spoke to a company that want's some rewrites to their new "fancy-shmancy design"... Ok maybe they didn't say it quite that way, but they did, honest to pete, tell me they were tired of copy that was all about the customer and wanted us to write about what a fun company they are. Not fun to work with, mind you, just generally fun.

And this is a "marketing company." (sigh)

A.

I've done a lot of work in the web usability area and also regarding trust/privacy seals.

The one overriding factor that influences people in trusting (where trust is antecedent to doing business) a website has little to do with trust seals, it's the site design.

(by the way, I'm not saying that seals won't have an impact)

It's the first impression. The more a website is in the vein of other well known (read "visited") sites e.g. amazon.com the more likely you are to achieve what you set out to with with a potential customer.

People are conditioned both positively and negatively.

There's a legal saying, if I can remember correctly, from contract law regarding penalty clauses: "You look at the subsatnce and not the form".

Well in this case, from what I found (this includes some primary research I conducted), the "form" does matter.

May be there is a distinction between offline and online aesthetics. My work has only covered the issue online.

Personally, too much emphasis is given to design i.e. the "form". Whereby it often foresakes "substance" i.e. the copy. But I don't think that good design should be foresaken for copy either.

Finding the balance between them (substance (copy) and form (design)) is the challenge. I suppose it comes down to the saying "the whole is more than the sum of its parts".

Best Wishes,

Tom

And what looks ugly to a marketer.

When I read Hacker's "ugly works" quote I had to check out this guys website since I've never heard of the him before and here it is:

The Hacker Group >>

Whoa!

Obviously I'm clueless as to his definition of "ugly" because he is saying one thing and doing the complete opposite on his website.

Perhaps Fortin is right when he said simple, clean design might be considered "ugly" to advertising guys.

Hacker writes:

I was once showing a piece of work to a brand new client. “Gawd, that thing is ugly," said the client.

“Thank you." I said, “We had to send it back to the design team three times to make it ugly enough to hit the response rate targets. Thanks for noticing—most clients miss it—I’ll thank the team for you."

Oh come on now...what a load fecal matter. I guess Hacker would consider every sample in Hatch's Million Dollar Mailing$ book "ugly."

If he considers those "ugly," then we'd have to classify Dan Kennedy's and Gary Halbert's stuff as butt-ugly.

I'll take simple, clean design (Hacker's "ugly") over artsy-phartsy and butt-ugly design any day. Guys like Eugene Schwartz, Ted Nicholas and Clayton Makepeace (and many more) would also agree, because they all believe in good design because it pulls better.

If you ask what to look at for potential gains in writing copy, you'll more or less get some consistent responses.

What about doing the same for graphics and layout? Graphics are almost a black box compared to copy. What we should have is almost like a testbed for testing things like...

Why Style Matters: A Simple CSS Trick to Boost Your Copy Response Rate

The ideas of pretty and ugly are all but useless in the marketing and copywriting context. And really, who cares? The idea of what aesthetic changes produce an increase in response rates could be quite interesting.