Can You Make It Uglier?
“Can you make it uglier?”
That’s my favorite question to ask when a teammate presents a new design.
Humans are wired to love beautiful things. That’s not a flaw—it’s biology. But in software design, beauty is a dangerous accomplice. It sneaks in quietly, hijacks critical thinking, and whispers: It looks good, so it must be good.
That’s the Goddess of Beauty trap.
She shows up quietly. The UI looks clean. The spacing is tasteful. The colors are just right. And suddenly, a designer’s critical thinking drops a notch. Because when something looks good, it feels finished.
So when I sense that happening, I ask the question.
“Can you make it uglier?”
The first time I say this, designers usually stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. Fair enough.
But what I’m really asking is:
- Are there any aesthetic sacrifices you could make to improve the feature’s usability, understandability, or discoverability?
- Did you dig deep enough—or were you satisfied by the current design’s beauty and stop iterating too early?
They know I’m not asking for a worse design, so they are forced to think hard and look for real improvements—even if those come at the expense of beauty or strict consistency–another God by the way. For example, in a set of four icon-only buttons, they might need to choose a word label for one of them, even if it slightly breaks visual consistency and looks “worse” at first glance.
I think this reasoning also applies to wireframes. For some reason, people and tools have managed to make them look cooler. Ironically, I’ve seen wireframes almost more attractive than the final product.
When you take beauty veil out, the truth shows up fast. Is the feature still understandable? Is it still usable? Is it discoverable? Does it still solve the problem exceptionally well?
Beauty can always come later—after the hard problems are solved.
That is why Walcu is ugly today, but will be beautiful tomorrow, and I am okay with that.