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If You’re Selling What They’re Buying, The Packaging Has Already Sold The Product

In the end, if people really want what you have to offer, you can only screw it up if you make egregious and unforced design errors. That’s the bottom line right there.

As a designer, I’ve always thought about the success of MySpace and how design had nothing to do with its success. People want what MySpace was offering, so they could only do wrong if their design was so horrible that it hindered the abilities of the site. It doesn’t. It’s good enough. If people can hop in and accomplish tasks, use the site, create what they want to create, then the design has succeeded.

Design isn’t what something looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

People who have seen the new 9rules design (launching this Wednesday) have said that it’s the best 9rules yet, far surpassing the previous iterations. This conclusion is probably a function of the following variables:

1. It fulfills their 9rules need, the need to easily find great member content.
2. It doesn’t get in the way of fulfilling need #1.
3. It’s nicely designed, but not overkill.

These seem like stupid easy things to accomplish with a site, but when you’re deep in the site and have been running & using the site for many years (like we have) then you lose sight of what really matters. Previous iterations had more content on them, more types of content, so the various pages were more like a jump-off to guide you to the pages you really wanted to view. That technique is not the way to go, and it only took me 3 years to realize it:

People don’t want to click, they want to see.

The new 9rules is all about seeing, right off the bat. Get on the site, see what you want. Reddit does this very well — they know what users want and they drop it all in your lap right on the homepage.

Give people want they want as soon as they see your site. Don’t give them a tidbit and hope they click to see “the full list” because it doesn’t happen. Give them what they want. Figure out what the user is buying and sell it to them. Don’t mess around.