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Beauty is subjective; Usability is not.

Good design must be usable; otherwise we'd call it art.

That Facebook redesign for example, while very aesthetically pleasing it looks horrible or confusing to use:

  * Search box doesn't look like an input control
  * Low contrast for top right nav (how do I change to any other page?)
  * Where did my groups and apps go?
  * Large pictures, great for mock ups, but it just means more scrolling when 80% of
    content I don't care or want to see;
    I really don't want to have a picture of a high school friend's baby take up the whole screen
  * etc.
It looks nice though.


They later changed the search box, but I recall at the time their motivation was "we want the title of the page to also be a search field, rather than just a search field". It sort of made sense.




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