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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata: once upon a time, I got into a conversation with the chap writing the sign outside a restaurant in Morocco, with the dishes of the day. With a smile on his face, he pointed out a spelling mistake on the sign: it was one he made deliberately, because he found (or believed) that more customers came in with the mistake than without. Less professional, more informal vibe?

My whole trip to Morocco was very enlightening. The locals were extremely sharp WRT tourists and word got around surprisingly quickly. It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it. Economies usually suffer for more structural reasons.

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I used to work for a price comparison website in the UK. After a big redesign which took them from being a horrendous mess to "glitzy web-2.0 style" (this was 2006) their conversion rates went down.

They did some user research, and a lot of users said they trusted the site less after the redesign, because it now looked more like a typical advertising business.

I worked for a sketchy MMO site back in the day (MMOEdge), and my friend who ran the site paid $20k for a very professional and slick-looking pre-built site from a team in Australia. It looked really good, much better than the old amateur-looking site that was currently running. But when he switched to it, he found conversion rates went down, by quite a bit actually. We couldn't figure it out and eventually switched back to the old "cheap" looking site, and traffic was restored.

There's something about looking TOO professional that turns people away, I guess.

I find most "Web-2.0" websites childish and amateurish-looking. It's really a matter of taste. The Bloomberg site looks cheap to me -- just like a tabloid in the supermarket.

It looked much more trustworthy a couple of years ago.

I felt the same way 10-15 years ago when the WSJ print edition started using color on the front page.

I suspect that Craigslist would suffer the same way if they ever really changed. After all, that guy Craig whose list this is is not the same as some corporate slick entity and it makes it all look more genuine.

Maybe it's that the semi-unprofessional look implies a personal connection, like it's just "that guy Craig" like you said, vs. an impersonal and polished corporation.

I know I am much more willing to run some software downloaded from a website that looks like it hasn't changed since the late 90s and is maintained by one person and their dog.

This reminds me of a documentary about Costco that mentioned the company's significant efforts to "look cheap" without actually being cheap, in the negative sense of the word.

link?

This reminds me of the 2010 Digg redesign, which resulted in a massive user exodus to a much less polished looking reddit...

I never really used Digg myself, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I wonder how much is due to utility. A lot of the new user interfaces I see these days simply do not have the same utility as older ones did; there's been a clear trend in dumbing things down, called "minimalism". Just look at Gnome3; they removed all kinds of configuration options.

Reddit is a very "busy" site. But you can do a LOT on it; there's many different features packed into it. The same thing happened over on Slashdot: the old versions had more features, and their "Beta" version tried to "simplify" things which really meant removing features.

To be fair, the exodus was more to do with them promoting paid content and less to do with the UI changes.

Ling's Cars (ex-Dragoin's Den) seems to still be very much in business despite the visual madness on her website:

http://www.lingscars.com/

I think if it wasn't like that then it wouldn't be Ling's.

It's also worth doing a view source....she's even got her face plastered all over the code :)

That said, not sure taking a side (either way) on the EU referendum is something I'd plaster on the home page of my business site.

IIRC I have seen this discussed here on HN, someone had A/B tested their automated thanks-for-signing-up response mails "from the CEO" and found a significant improvemed response rate when they included one small speling mistake in the Subject.

> improvemed

Are you A/B testing us?

You bwt :-)

'speling mistake'?

pretty sure that mailing list email body copy with the slightly awkward formatting a CEO might use for general correspondence will tend to outperform a neat obviously-a-mailshot-created-by-marketing HTML template when it comes to generating many types of response as well.

Possibly it depends upon the audience.

Another possibility is that someone makes an error and then claims it was intentional testing.

> It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it.

A relative of mine is the CEO of the Fiji branch of a major multinational B2B services company.

Every few years, the regional headquarters in Australia would send over a guy from either Australia or New Zealand to manage some department. This would almost always end in disaster.

The problem was that they would always end up insulting clients. Clients were multi-million dollar corporations, but since they were usually family run businesses, their founders/CEO's often spoke poor english. I guess this is what made these (white) men assume that they were idiots and end up talking down to them. The one time it worked was when the guy they sent was Aussie, but had been raised in Papua New Guinea.

When this relative of mine became CEO, one of his first decisions was to ask HQ to send him a guy from their Sri Lanka office instead. It's been about five years now and they've had no more problems.

On the flip side of this, white expat professionals sent to work in management roles for multinational companies in Pakistan and India will frequently find that their equivalently-ranked colleagues have better spelling and grammar than they do, having studied the Queen's English in elite private schools since kindergarten. The only major difference being pronunciation.

I don't think the OP was commenting on the intelligence of the locals, but more their grasp of a foreign language. I've studied Chinese for six years and lived in Taiwan for four of them, I still make elementary mistakes because it's just not my native tongue. I bet if I was drawing up a menu I'd miss a couple characters or strokes on characters.

Not in the least surprising. I think it stems from something like...

Too professional = corporate, paid scientists telling you tobacco is good for you, politician, used car salesman, style over substance.

Less professional = honest craftsman, technician, artisan. It's more likely to be about the actual food than an empty brand experience.

Of course there's also the chance they're just not very good, but it's probably not a bad generalisation.

I'm sure there is research into this, but all I can find is blog opinions.

I've heard it is common for many Chinese people, when eating at a Chinese restaurant in another country, choosing the cheapest looking restaurant, the restaurant with the most basic signage, shops that haven't changed much since the 1970's, etc. Reason being they expected the unpretentious and basic looking restaurants to be much more authentic.

There is a Greek food place on south 1st ave in Seattle that advertises "BEST YEEROS IN TOWN!" on their sign. Yes they know what a Gyro is and how it's really spelled.

"he found (or believed) that more customers came in with the mistake than without"

I love this piece of (unintentional?) data-driven decision-making!

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