My Aesthetics Bring All The Users To The Yard: It’s Better Than Yours

Three aesthetic principles: layout, color, and typography work together to create the overall look and feel of a website. The AirBnB’s website provides a very clear message, with a focus on the homes the user plans to rent. Sufficient white space makes the homes stand out, and the information for each home is easily identifiable. The relevant information required to make a decision on an AirBnB home is prominent and clear. The various filter options at the top of the screen are accessible and easy to use, while also unintrusive. Above the fold, the user clearly understands the purpose of the website: to explore vacation home rentals with no other distractions. AirBnB’s implementation of the three aesthetic principles creates a welcoming user environment.

Alternatively, LingsCars struggles to successfully implement the three aesthetic principles. In hopes of appealing to a younger audience, LingsCars focuses on implementing a fun and engaging website and forgets to provide a clear message to the user. The user easily becomes lost on the website struggling to know what to focus on. The overactive background and overall website lacks sufficient white space and would easily confuse an older audience. While Ling proves extremely likable, an improper use of emphasis and scale incorrectly draws more attention to Ling than to the cars he is selling. Above the fold, the user is left with the impression that we are not sure if we are supposed to like Ling, or if we are trying to buy a car.


Layout

The layout of a website plays an influential role in determining website quality. AirBnB utilizes emphasis and scale as the photographs serve as focal points of the webpage. The user immediately notices the vacation destinations first, as expected. The photographs appear larger than other elements on the screen. After noticing the vacation destination, the user’s eyes are drawn to the price point that is displayed in bold and underlined while the other elements of the text are muted with a lighter color. While AirBNB does not implement the rule of thirds or the rule of odds, the webpage utilizes a flexible, liquid design that shows more tiles horizontally the larger the screen gets. AirBnb implements reusable components in a grid layout utilizing CSS flexbox which provides organized, flexible designs. 

When a user looks at LingsCars, we love Ling. We think Ling is fun. But we never selected a car because we spent time focusing on Ling instead of focusing on purchasing a car. You become overwhelmed by the busy background and leave to buy a car elsewhere, where the cars are the focus of the page and not the person who is selling them. 


Typography

LingsCars uses a variety of font faces that do not seem to blend together and make font illegible in many cases. Some fonts are really small, while other, meaningless text is really large. It is hard to find the information you are looking for to make a car purchase. The focus is not on the information about the product he is selling, but on trusting Ling.

On AirBnB, your eye is quickly drawn to the price when you need more information. Next to the price is a date range, intuitively telling the user when the rental is next available and for how long, followed by how far away the location is and the name of the city and state of the rental. This information is presented in an easy to read typography, appropriate font size, color and style.


Color

Apart from the AirBnB logo, AirBnB has no other color on the page except for the homes they are showcasing. The user’s eye is naturally drawn to look at the homes and not at the rest of the site. The red logo gives the user a sense of adventure, passion and simplicity. You can almost imagine visiting any of the beautiful and desirable vacation homes more easily because of the simplistic and precise use of color.

LingCars uses a busy background with a flashy color scheme that uses multiple colors, and does not seem to follow a pattern. This clash of color contrast makes interpreting his site difficult for many users.

In summary, AirBnB utilizes the aesthetic principles and clearly creates a positive user experience. By contrast, LingsCars.com is proclaimed as having “one of the best websites on the internet”, according to newsweek.com, as well as having “the worst website”, according to the whitelabelagency.com. But despite where you stand about the quality of Ling’s website, everyone agrees that Ling is a marketing genius and that his website is “so bad that it’s good”. His site is extremely popular for the audience he targets. I enjoy LingsCars, and while Ling is successful, his site does not follow our aesthetic principles. 


References

Stig, D. C. (2017, August 3). Ling's cars: 3 reasons why the worst website on the internet is actually genius. WLA. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://thewhitelabelagency.com/lings-cars-3-reasons-worst-website-internet-actually-genius/ 

Vacation Homes & Condo rentals. Airbnb. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://www.airbnb.com/ 

Valentine, L. (n.d.). Personal & Business Car Leasing. LINGsCARS. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://www.lingscars.com/ 

Veix, J. (2017, January 7). In defense of bizarre websites. Newsweek. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/23/lings-cars-website-532332.html 

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