--- title: "Usability vs. Beauty" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/6/usability-vs-beauty.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/6/usability-vs-beauty.html" published: "2003-09-06T09:34:00" updated: "2003-09-06T09:34:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Mickey Williams takes me to task on Usability vs. Beauty . I disagree, but understand his point. I think more beautiful designs are simply more usable. Why? Because they are more pleasing to use. [ Robert Scoble ]…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Usability vs. Beauty By Roy Osherove September 6, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published September 6, 2003; technical details may be outdated. [_Mickey Williams takes me to task on Usability vs. Beauty_](http://www.servergeek.com/2003_08_31_blog_arc.htm#106260459985013150)_. I disagree, but understand his point. I think more beautiful designs are simply more usable. Why? Because they are more pleasing to use._ \[[](http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/09/05.html#a4507)[Robert Scoble](http://scoble.weblogs.com/)\] Totally disagree. Take a look at a product like "[Total Commander](http://www.ghisler.com/)". It still has that 70's software look, yet it is still one of the most known and beloved software products. Why? Because it gets the job done for which it was created, and it does it with a minimum of fuss or arrogance. It's still one of the most usable tools out there for admins even though many competitors have risen to the challenge. Of course, it could not have done this without setting the expectations to the right place. Don't expect a nice GUI, but do expect to be able to do anything with keyboard shortcuts. Even though it has lots  of missing "usability" features (Some of the dialogs just suck) it still wins out over a lot of other products. I've tried them all, and always went back and so have many many others. Just look for "file managers" in google. The best thing is - it's just a successor to "Norton Commander" which was the most used app in the DOS days. People still look for that power/simplicity combo, and TC seems to be one of the few that provides it. Usability does not always mean “low learning curve”. It does mean “consistent” almost always. TC is consistent with NC keystrokes and a lot of people used that. It's like a legacy that moved on. Same reason that Word still has a setting to look like word 95 somewhere (along with key binding). Take a desk clerk who handles his work with paper and no computer. Now give them the most usable paper processing app. What should it look like? It should like exactly like what his desk looked like, along with painted papers that can be moved around, labels and all. It should not look like a windows form. It should be consistent with what the work used to be like. That's how you win. TC does exactly that. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Sep 8, 2003 ### [Why people are not into RSS readers](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/8/why-people-are-not-into-rss-readers.html) - Sep 8, 2003 ### [The OLE syndrom](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/8/the-ole-syndrom.html) - Sep 5, 2003 ### [Pics from the new office](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/5/pics-from-the-new-office.html) - Sep 5, 2003 ### [The Hyperlinked Organization](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/9/5/the-hyperlinked-organization.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/