Andy Rutledge over at UX Magazine has a good rant on why sucky web sites that are successful still suck.

Examples he points to are Google, eBay and Boingboing. I don’t read Boingboing, but I’m a user of both Google and eBay and I can attest that they do both completely suck when it comes to UI.

Google is clean. Yes, we get it. But you could present a lot more information and still keep the search function front and center. Then maybe, just maybe, I’d use something like the Google personalized home page. Problem is, it’s ugly. Try it. It looks circa 1996 crappy-ass web site. GMail isn’t much better. Gmail works cool. But it’s like the Edsel of webmail apps. Sure it runs great, but good lord it’s got a face that looks like it fell outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Like he says in the article, Craigslist is well-designed “undesign”. Google is just badly designed. The search results pages are pretty crappy as well. A lot could be done to make the SERPs much more user-friendly. Like not throwing all the info for the result into one gobble-de-gook mess of a paragraph.

eBay is the same way. For all the experimentation they do with their UI, you’d think they’d get it right eventually. But no… And tell me again why I have to LOG IN to get to see completed auctions? Come on… let’s get with the 2.0 guys!

So, let’s stop letting commercial success promote bad design. Just because a sucky web site’s business model doesn’t suck doesn’t mean we should copy them Beavis.