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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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