And sometimes bad usability is what sells too. That's why you have TVs that come with remotes with a million buttons on them, it makes the buyer feel like he's

And sometimes bad usability is what sells too. That's why you have TVs that come with remotes with a million buttons on them, it makes the buyer feel like he's got something powerful, and by extension, makes him feel powerful. If your target audience is interested in feeling powerful and achieving a sense of mastery, there's a way to design for that. If you want the audience to feel like they're getting something for cheap (Amazon, Craigslist, Ebay), there's a design for that. Ugly design is still design though, it works in one context and fails in another. But that doesn't mean you've freed yourself from the tyranny of aesthetics, you're just using the aesthetic that works. There's a great temptation for programmers to conclude that if they can't do something by themselves, it must not matter, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably a corporate drone or something. Maybe this works in some cases, but that doesn't mean it's not also a mistake. It's like that joke about the guy who lost his keys in the alley behind a bar one night. His friend finds him on the sidewalk looking under a street light, and asks him why he's not looking in the alley. The guy says "It's too dark in the alley, I can't see a thing!" The moral of the story: when faced with a difficult real-world problem that you don't know how to solve with your current skillset, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to change the problem into a different one that you do know how to solve. Maybe you don't need good design, but if you do, you should get a designer, and ignore blog posts about how pretty things are for girls.