Wrong. As it turned out, we spent a whole month building that feature and scrapped it in the following month. It wasn’t as easy to browse as a traditional list, and most of all, hardly anyone used Explore to browse esports data. What people really wanted was just a simple display of team standings, not fancy cards with pictures that only fit 3 to a page. It was the epitome of Form over Function

Since then, we went through some roller coaster ride as a product team — a few pivots here and there, and learned numerous product lessons along the way. Most important of all is that in our design process, we should strive to strike a balance between Function and Form: Not one over the other, but a delicate balance that optimizes for both efficiency and delight.

Function

Users don’t want a novel interface; they just want a good one.

Design with (better) purpose

I firmly believe that there are three goals for design:

The vast majority of designers try to satisfy the first goal — focusing on aesthetics — but fail to satisfy the product goal, and far fewer satisfy the business goal. The evolution of our homepage is an example of how we went from accomplishing the aesthetic goal to the product goal, and then the business goal.

The original homepage that we shipped this February accomplished the aesthetic goal — it set the voice for the overall website with a large cover story, followed by a list of top news articles. After we shipped the site, however, we found that the majority of users who visited the homepage left the site without clicking on any links.