Getting the design right

There’s an interesting discussion on reddit right now about the design of a certain computer retailer website in Australia and whether this was a legitimate example of poor design. It’s interesting to me because I actually bought a PCMCIA network card from those guys a long time ago and their customer service was so horrible that I swore never to do business with them again. Yet 4 years later, they’re still clearly in business and seem to have tripled the number of stores they own. So I think it’s an interesting question to ask of whether their website really is as poorly designed as the initial poster assumed it was.

Lets get the preliminary obvious things out of the way: The site has horrible aesthetics, a total disregard for correct color theory and horrendous usability problems (including PDF price lists, ugh). But as someone pointed out in the discussion thread, the stores also have lines going out the door every single day. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when all you have is Dream Weaver, everything looks like a web design problem and just because the site has a web design problem does not mean that it has a design problem.

Lets say you had a journeyman web designer in to do a complete overhaul of the site. Nothing fancy, no high concept flash based monstrosity, just some simple, well laid out minimalistic, tasteful HTML and CSS. Would this be a better design?

Lets say this web designer was also a part time analytics dabbler as well and he knew the importance of not only doing good design but justifying it as well. He manages to prove that user engagement with the site is up, the bounce rate is lower and informal customer surveys indicate they love the new website. Surely this must be a better design right?

Being the paranoid web designer that he is though, he’s prepared yet more information to make his case: He points to how annual revenue increased 60% year on year even after controlling for other sources of growth. Mining the customer records indicates a significant increase of first time purchasers and a larger average orders per customer, all of which can be reasonably conclusively linked to the new word of mouth marketing and better navigation of the new website. Based on a reasonable set of accounting assumptions, the investment on a new website yielded a stunning 50,000% ROI. Satisfied that the designer has convincingly demonstrated the utility of his role, he sits back, utterly unable to comprehend any counter argument to how the previous website could be considered not be considered an example of bad design.

And yes, at this point, I would probably agree with him. If a mythical competent web designer fell into their laps, then there would be no excuse for them to keep the design of their old site. But here’s the thing, I’ve interacted with the owners of this company, they’re a family of stingy Asians (in the totally non-pejorative sense). These are not the types of people who would a) meet and b) appreciate a competent web designer. To imagine the preceding set of events happening, you first have to imagine a completely different type of business which is founded on a completely different business model and would be arguably as successful as the one they have now.

I’m not arguing that the site has good design, just that I’m open to the possibility that it’s not obviously bad design given the context and circumstances.