September 23, 2024
Yes, it does matter if your product is ugly
A select few companies can get away with clunky, ugly products. For the rest, beauty matters.
BY Liz Stinson
Despite what we’ve been told—that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—there are some statistical truths to what makes something nice to look at. A circle is more beautiful than a rectangle, and blue is a more pleasing color than brown.
“The worst thing that ever happened to beauty is [that] stupid sentence,” Stefan Sagmeister remarked during a recent talk at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. On stage, Sagmeister shared some compelling evidence, as he asked for a show of hands from the audience about which shapes and colors people preferred (a strong show of hands for the circle and blue; less so for the rectangle and brown). After people cast their votes, he revealed graphs demonstrating a near perfect mirror of preferences from his own research.
“I’ve done it hundreds of times all around the world, in person, as a stationary set up within exhibits and on Instagram, always with the same results,” he later explained over email about his testing methodology. “The circle is seen as most beautiful, the rectangle as the least beautiful.”
Beauty, Sagmeister suggested during his talk, is not so much in the eye of the beholder as it is in the hands of the people who shape the objects and interfaces we encounter daily. Beauty is not a given, but a choice.
“Things do not become beautiful on their own,” he said.
Sagmeister is an Austrian designer whose work spans graphic design, film, and typography. He is an ardent believer in beauty’s power as a transformational force in life and in business. At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, he was joined onstage by a group of designers—including Gabby Lord, cofounder and creative director of Super Keen Studio; Bruno Regalo, chief design officer at TBWA, and James Taylor, global head of design, TBWA\Media Arts Lab—who debated how valuable beauty is to the innovation process.
Taylor, whose work for TBWA/Media Arts Lab includes crafting marketing for Apple, says his job is not to convince people that Apple products are beautiful (we already know that); rather, it is to remind them that there is beauty in the gadgets’ functionality, as well. “How do we make Apple products feel less like tools and feel more like an enabler of experiences?” he said.
Earlier in his career, Taylor worked for CPG companies who were often risk averse when it came to the visual language of their products. “They would spend months testing and getting consumer research, which maybe took desire out of the equation,” he said. Beauty was not a guiding value for many old guard CPG companies. In fact, it could be seen as a drag on momentum.
Things have changed since then: 95% of products fail, and beauty (which can serve as shorthand for attractive branding) has become a differentiator for many successful products. Lord, whose branding work spans industries, called out Graza as a prime example. The DTC olive oil startup launched in 2022 with a high-design squeeze bottle. Since then, the company rocketed from $4 million in sales to a projected $48 million in 2024. “Graza is like a circle,” she said, nodding to the bottle’s undeniable beauty.
And yet, beauty is not always a prerequisite for success. Retail behemoths like Amazon seem to be exempt from the standards that smaller startup brands are beholden to. Its interface, a clunky hodgepodge of typefaces, buttons, and deceptive user experience elements, evokes a strip mall rather than a palatial store. Amazon doesn’t have to worry about making the experience enjoyable because it already knows you’ll shop there anyway. (Perhaps because Amazon’s other elements of product experience are still enticing enough to compensate for what’s ugly.)
For Sagmeister, there’s an under-appreciated benefit to the unpleasant experience of shopping on Amazon and its big box competitors. “If these [interfaces] were actually designed, I’m sure that we would all spend even more time on Amazon,” he said. “So, maybe it’s a good thing that it’s ugly.”
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