Sites like craigslist are in fact well designed, it's just that those sites feature a very minimal design (less = more). In fact if you want an example of a site that veered to encourage bad design MySpace is a good example. But even there you could argue that it was a well designed site because the audience for that site wanted their pages to be ugly and hard to read.

I think you'll find that really good design (and designers) always think of their audience first. This isn't just a design mindset, but a marketing one. That thinking is essential to creating any good product from a website to a cooking wok.

I think it matters. Wasn't one of the reasons MySpace lost vs Facebook the fact that users could edit their page to look like a vomit smoothie on MySpace but things were kept clean and uniform on Facebook?

Regardless I think it matters. There have been a few threads on here about how developers can't design for crap, and engineer developed sites look ugly. So I give up. I'm going to finish coding my project, then pay some design firm to make my ugly baby pretty and launch.

Successful sites that are poorly designed are outliers - early movers in big movers. It's not quite true to say that they succeed in spite of their design (a clean-looking, more usable Plentyoffish would get fewer ad clicks) but if you're competing with them then a great UX is going to put you at less of a disadvantage when it comes to attracting and retaining visitors, because the concept of dating sites being free isn't a new one.

Likewise, if you're Amazon you can afford to send users contemplating buying away from your website with sponsored links because they will most likely come back to your big name site to complete the purchase. If you're not Amazon you probably don't want any distractions for the users not geared towards upsell.

To some extent their designs are stuck in a local maximum because their relative ugliness is part of their brand: if Craigslist tidied up their design they'd probably see a big rise in bounces from people confused by being sent to listings that don't look like Craigslist.

I think what you're talking about is graphics rather than design. To me, design is the umbrella term encompassing UX, UI and graphics. so I'll rephrase the question: Do graphics matter?

While it may not the biggest part of design, graphics still do matter. "The way things look" plays a big role in how your eyes move through the space of your product, where your attention goes, and ultimately, where someone decides they've had enough and are ready to leave. Basic Examples: is the call-to-action button colored in a way that I can spot it instantly? Is the text readable enough that I'm not fatigued after a few posts?

design definitely matters. There is the emotional part of design - does it evoke the right emotions just by the way it looks. Then there is the usability part of design. Usability is all about speed

There are other areas, but these are the key ones:

1) learnability -how fast can a first time (new) user figure out how to accomplish the primary tasks 2) efficiency - how fast can a repeat user accomplish the primary tasks 3) memorability - how fast can a user regain proficiency after a period of time

Core to this is understanding the primary tasks. Design is absolutely critical when you think about the essence of it as speed

HN seems to be popular enough even though it serves up link expired things way too often. Does that count as a UX problem?

Digg and Gawker are good examples of driving users away with bad design.