For years and years when someone asked me what music I liked I said, “Everything but country and rap.” A good friend of mine pushed me on my response one day and I finally realized that country and rap music is just another form of art that at that time I did not fully appreciate. I am not longer a punk rock snob, although I don’t listen country on a regular basis, I have a deep appreciation for the art form – I have fallen in love with rap however.

We do the same thing in design. We have all heard and used the phrase “That design sucks!” or “Your design sucks!” Although most of us think we know and understand composition and can critique another designers work at lightning speed, but lets ask ourselves these questions:

• Do we really know why a design is flawed or not?
• Do we really do it from an unbiased position, or do we let our own personal bias and preferences influence our judgments?
• Does your design suck just because a Mac design snob decides its does, or does it depend on who is viewing/using the design?
• Do the users matter when it comes to design or is it just the responsibility of the designer to force the user to use something “better”?

Popularity

Popularity, just like in high school, creates copycats. Just because Facebook has three-bazillion users doesn’t mean that its design and composition is wonderful. In fact, for something as simple as sharing status’ and pictures it may be one of the hardest to learn web applications in the digital world. Have you ever tried to understand how Facebook’s privacy settings work? Or tried to create a fanpage for your homemade fuzzy slippers?

Changing your header background color to solid #3B5998 to mimic Facebook will not guarantee the success of your Uncle’s Razor Scooter website. Popular websites are destructive to the design world, but only for those designers who don’t fully understand why a popular websites design works. Facebook’s design works for many reasons but mostly because it’s form and function work together well.

Look at the Web 2.0 movement and its signature rounded corners. When the rounded corner made its splash in the web world, every hip new “Web 2.0″ site had them. Why? Because it was awesome right? At the time every designer who wanted to achieve Web 2.0 – without even knowing what Web 2.0 was – would simply just copy the look and feel of a site that had achieved it. In many cases this meant implementing cool CSS tricks like rounded corners. But as more and more designers gave in to their popularity insecurities, the more and more the rounded corner became less meaningful.

Copying popular websites to capitalize on their popularity may seem like a great thing to do and initially it may work. But this technique never leads to a true identity for your site or app, so when the trends changes, so will your site.

Taste

Now, I love corn on the cob, in fact, I don’t eat much corn unless its on the cob. Does this mean that “corn off the cob” is any less tasty or nutritious? Nope. It all boils down to personal taste. Some designers swear by dark text on light backgrounds, never design otherwise and even work so hard to prove scientifically that it is better than its opposite – light text on dark backgrounds. One is not necessarily better than the other. They both have their places in the vast world of web composition, but figuring out what compositional elements will taste better can be the hardest thing a designer ever does. The key is find out what taste your user prefers first.

If I have people coming over the house for a BBQ and I know most of them hate hot dogs and love hamburgers, would I serve hot dogs to them just because I prefer hot dogs more? Probably not, unless I was a jerk. The point is, design is a matter of taste and one person may love your bright green text borders over a dead black background while others would say that “it sucks”, but what do your core user like? Who are your core users and what do they do on your site?

A lot of designers down play the role of users and believe that the user experience in unimportant to the over design because user don’t know what they want. This just isn’t true. Users know exactly what they want. Now I do agree that some users have no preference and that sometimes users will overlook or deal with bad UX design because of powerful features.

This kind of user behavior is learned however. For years the user has been forced to work with a bad design because designers and developers made them. But knowing who your user is – or will be – can eliminate a lot of design taste pitfalls. Just because you as a designer prefer something doesn’t mean you audience will.

Utility

Just because someone owns a truck doesn’t mean they are a construction worker. There is a reason why we design for familiarity, but this doesn’t mean that we have to stick to stereotypes and convention one-hundred percent of the time.

In our minds we have a template for every genre of web design just like we have perceived musical formulas for music. We think that when we see a white background with three columns that is should be an e-commerce site just like when we see a band playing a mandolin we assume they are country. The utility of the website shouldn’t define the look and feel of it. Innovative, great design in most cases can break the utility convention.

The function of a website should marry with the form of a website, not dictate its look. This comes back to our user once again. What does our user prefer, or what will our users like? If you are creating a blog for a client, you’ll want to stick with the conventional elements of a blog, like having a sidebar with categories listing and tag indicators. These elements tell your users that they in fact reading a blog, but this doesn’t mean you have to use the formulaic two column layout with a large title header – like this particular site. Maybe your users are more accepting of an innovative blog layout so why not give it a try.

To Close

Ironically, the websites that replicate every bias we have as designers are our wonderful design blogs/magazines that we love to waste most of our day reading. Design blogs have been victim to popularity, taste and utility (including this one) because Smashing Magazine is Donkey Kong throwing barrels at the rest of us… we’d really love to have the success that they have enjoyed, so we copy its design and methods. But the real brilliance of Smashing is its innovation. It was one of the first design magazines to really brand itself. It was one of the first design magazines to really define a new path.

As designers we need to be making the interwebs better, not worse. This means trying our best to be innovative and making the web a more usable place. Its a long battle because everyday more and more unusable garbage is heaped on the pile. But when we are tempted to copy a popular site, force a particular design bias or use a template machine, we need to smack our selves in the face and remember that we aren’t the only ones who will be using our design.

About the author

Patrick Cox wrote 37 articles on this blog.

Patrick Cox is a UI Developer at The Active Network, freelance web designer and creator of BlurbHerd.com - yet another web design blog. He's also a musician, football fanatic and pizza lover. Follow him on twitter @pcridesagain.

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