Beautiful Is Not the Same as Useful

In April 2013, an email from a friend led me back to his website.

He had built it in 2005. It had been a beautiful design. Eight years later, it was still the same.

By then, the site no longer worked well for the people visiting it. It was not responsive. It did not adapt to tablets or phones. Some of its text was embedded in images. What had once looked considered now made the experience harder.

I called him.

He resisted the idea of changing it. He had invested several months in the design, and he was proud of what he had made. Both things were true. The work had required care, and the result had once been good.

Neither truth made the website useful in 2013.

That is the difficult part of replacing something we built ourselves. We remember the effort. The user meets only the result.

A design can deserve respect and still need to be replaced. The question is not how much work went into it. The question is whether it still helps the people it was made for.

The website was only an example. The same attachment can settle around a process, a product, a role, or a decision. What once served us becomes familiar. Familiarity begins to look like value.

But usefulness can move while the thing itself remains unchanged.

If the people we serve have moved on and our design has not, preserving the design is not loyalty to the work. It is loyalty to effort already spent.

Source note

This historical Journal note is adapted from Scrap that beautiful design, first published on April 18, 2013. The original source date and any future Almanac publication date remain separate.