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October 10, 2005  Burrito is the New Black

A little while ago Max told Sergio and I that he felt the ideal user interface for Slide would be like a burrito: satisfying, but not overly sophisticated. I suspect there is a widespread fear that a website that feels "designed" won't appeal to a consumer market. Tapan Bhat--formerly a Director of Product Management at Adobe, now at Yahoo!--once told me "Don't be afraid to be ugly. People like ugly." This is the essence of burrito design.

Many companies have been successful without paying much attention to design. Indeed, many embrace the notion of anti-design. They're proud of their ugly, busy websites.

If Myspace

wanted the typographic elegance Eris Free is able to acheive

it could hire her to help them (okay, technically she's at Apple now, but there are other people they could hire). But that's not what they're interested in.

That said, I believe Max is wrong. Giving away burritos is great, until a competitor comes along giving out filet mignon.

As Jeffrey McManus, who works at Yahoo!, describes from a session he attended at Web 2.0 called "What Teens Want":
"None of them use Yahoo for much of anything (not for IM, not for search, not for shopping, not for mail) except as a sort of second-chance search when Google didn't give them what they wanted. They hate the Yahoo home page because it's busy and weighed down with ads, no surprise there."

By the way, if you're interested in helping Sergio and I at Slide figure out how to make the filet mignon, please get in touch with one of us. We need someone full-time in San Francisco. It would help if you were good with JavaScript and were interested in techniques like those in Donovan's LivePage.

Posted by johnnie at 12:30 AM | Comments (7)