An Un-ROI Argument for Beauty
An organism needs to invest energy in being beautiful. You won’t see healthy skin on a sick animal, because maintaining a healthy coat is too ‘expensive’. A sick peacock isn’t as spectacular as a healthy one. Or a genetically damaged chimp isn’t going to have as symmetrical a face. As a result, most creatures evolved their definitions of beauty in a mate to match the displays of healthy creatures. (Seth Godin, Beauty as a Signaling Strategy)
Great argument for why “looking good” has benefits beyond those that can be quantified. An elegant design or a little bit of flair can rarely be directly connected to a 2% higher utilization or 4% efficiency gain, but it sets a tone, an expected level of values. It’s the tip of the iceberg: if we care this much about this little detail that you can see, just imagine how much care we put into the massive underlying platform that isn’t immediately visible.
The reverse is true as well: I’ve been mortified during customer demos when a big, obvious, sloppy misalignment or typo was present in our beta application.
The customer won’t notice, said the engineer who didn’t have time to fix it.
If you can’t spell correctly, how can we trust you to run our business, said the customer.
It’s going to be tempting in this economic climate for companies to cut back on “beauty” – whether that means preserving a page layout by not bombarding it with ads, or taking a few extra seconds to make a customer service call more effective. But product managers should think about what that says about your overall “health” as a company. Do you want to look like a wounded animal? Now is not the time to have a vulnerable-looking product.
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Tags: brand, Design, the whole product
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