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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Can all designers exit the room for a moment?

I am skeptical that "looks pretty" drives conversions. I think customers pretty much don't care, based on "ugly" versions winning in many, many of my tests. Remember: the customer doesn't get to see the pretty alternative laid out side by side with the ugly alternative.

Example: form submit buttons in your Internet browser of choice look fairly pretty, right? (Or at least comfortingly familiar.) I would not describe http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/bcc.net/next-step.png as pretty -- it is what I could throw together in ten minutes. But it clocks "pretty" buttons with the same text on it.

You're welcome to try it yourself if you think pixel-perfect alignment will make a difference. Please post results.

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I'm as far from design as possible most of the time... and I simply don't feel invited by your madlibs form implementation. On the other hand Huffduffer form just looks amazing. You missed some elements which I think are crucial for what they've done...

In the Huffduffer example the keywords are exposed, the fields look clear and spacing is just the way it feels nice. There's also a rhythm - keyword, field, keyword, field... even though it's not a standard form - you just know what to do with it. LukeW's implementation is not as pleasing, but still looks good, because there's some whitespace and no clutter.

I don't think you actually compared good standard form to good madlibs form. You compared it to a hacky, badly implemented madlibs and wrote off the whole idea ("Anyhow: test ended, not touching the madlibs idea again").

It isn't a matter of looking 'pretty', it is how does the brain visually understand it as simple or not. I agree that there designers go overboard with 'it doesn't have the right padding', etc. But you can't ignore HUGE test like red makes people hungry more (McDonalds) etc. That sort of design does translate, and the mad-libs form just looks confusing.

I would press that button just to make it go away. ;)

Not that it matters -- the data matter -- but I can certainly rationalize why such a button would be more effective than a standard form submit button: My peripheral vision has seen a hundred thousand form submit buttons by now. I'm not quite as blind to them as I am to standard-sized non-animated web ads, but it's close.

And it seems to me that the problem with being a designer is that it's physically impossible to design a web form in less time than the average user will spend looking at it. You will necessarily spend orders of magnitude more time looking at your forms than a visitor will: Visitors don't look at forms for fun. They click through them fast, or they click away from them even faster. If I had to stare at that button for an hour, as opposed to simply finding it and clicking it as fast as I could, I'd design it differently. Which might very well screw it up.

Ugly/scary drives me away from converting.

Me too. However people like me and you aren't always the target audience.

It's remarkably difficult to evaluate your own reasons for making decisions. Just consider advertising. It works very well, but nobody thinks it works on them.

In general, buttons that stand out more get clicked more. Ugly things tend to stand out better. In fact, 'standing out' may be a passable proxy for measuring 'ugly.' In a similar trend, annoying TV ads were found to be more effective than non-annoying ones because people remembered them better.

The design of something is the first indicator I use to evaluate how trustworthy a site is. The better the design the more I know that these people put alot of thought into it and spent money and time on it. Now, overly clever stuff is definitely annoying and bad.. but ugly is a big red flag.

No, web browser [form] buttons are not pretty.

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