pretty software doesn't win

There's a widespread belief that good UX and good design are what make products successful. Designers talk about it. VCs talk about it. Product people build entire careers around it.

It's mostly wrong.

I've used matching apps with truly terrible interfaces because they had the right people on them. I've sat through Zoom calls on what was, for years, one of the ugliest applications on the internet, because it was the one video call that actually worked. Craigslist looked like a crime scene for two decades and dominated classifieds. Google's homepage was a text field on a white page when every other portal was trying to be a magazine.

The pattern is consistent. Products win because they solve a problem, not because they look good solving it.

This isn't the same as saying UX doesn't matter at all. If your product is so broken that people literally cannot complete the task they came for, that's a problem. But that's a very low bar. "Can the user accomplish the thing" is different from "is the experience delightful." The first one matters. The second one is nice to have.

What actually drives adoption is value. Does this thing do something I need? Is it better than the alternative? The alternative is often "doing it manually" or "not doing it at all," and almost any interface beats those.

I think the obsession with polish comes from a specific failure mode: people build something nobody wants, then blame the UI when nobody uses it. "We need to improve the onboarding flow." "The conversion funnel needs work." Maybe. Or maybe nobody cares about what you're selling regardless of how pretty the funnel is.

The most successful products I've seen launched ugly and stayed ugly for a long time. They got users because they had something people wanted. The design improved later, after there was revenue to fund it and data to inform it. The ones that launched beautiful and empty stayed empty.

If you're building something and you're spending more time on spacing and animations than on whether anyone actually wants it, you have your priorities backwards.

Ship the ugly thing. See if anyone cares. That's the only test that matters.