Usefulnes vs Design

For my first blog post, I thought I’d respond to an article I read recently on the importance of usefulness over design. You can find the article at www.cmswire.com. The article has a point with which agree, which is many of today’s websites feature great designs in the visual sense, which are unfortunately hard to use. While, that is true, I find it to be a gross simplification of the real world scenario. Many websites do look beautiful, but fail to group together related elements into groups, or destroy consistency throughout for the sake of beauty. At the same time, however, there are beautiful designs that keep their consistency and hierarchy of elements throughout. These types of sites tend to be gorgeous looking as well as easy to use, as they kept it all in mind during the design process. Sure, there are some lightly designed sites that work perfectly, and in some cases I am grateful for their simple design, or lack thereof (eg craigslist). But then on the other hand there is always www.apple.com, www.ibm.com and www.wacom.com amongst many which I find to be very beautiful in terms of structure, and message, as well as easy to read.