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Prioritizing design over function for your product can actually make it harder to validate your value proposition.Let's talk about why design isn't critically important and why you should focus on experience more than anything.If you want to reach product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course here - https://nxtstep.io/fit/Episode TranscriptionHey folks, Sean here.And today what I want to talk to youabout is something I call the beauty trap.And that's where people prioritize the design oftheir product over the function of the product.Now, why I consider this to be a trapis because if you make your product look great,that can actually motivate people to gravitate towards it.As in they'll start using it because it looksgreat, it's attractive, but ultimately a lot of peoplemight stop using it because your product isn't providingthem with kind of value that they need.And that could be misleading in the beginning becauseif people are using your product but ultimately stopusing your product, or worse, if you're not payingclose attention to how consistently people are using yourproduct, you might not know that ultimately it's notperforming all that well.Even though people are using it, they'renot getting value out of it.And that's what really matters.That's why we always prioritize the function over theaesthetic, but that can be misleading in the beginning.Let me talk about this in a little bit moredetail and compare the two and also share an example.Now in the beginning, what I actually recommend peopledo, especially with early stage products, is almost focuson not making the product look great.That sounds weird, but let me explain as innot prioritize the design, but instead prioritize the function.The reason why I recommend this is because prioritizingthe design can be tricky and can enable youto fall into what I call this beauty trap.As in if people are gravitating to yourproduct for the wrong reasons, that's actually goingto be misleading for you, cause trouble.Further down the road, we see thisstrategy leveraged successfully in other industries.For example, some logo design or web design companieswill present early stage designs but do so ingrayscale or not add photos so that they canmake it easier for their customers to focus onbasically the function that they've created first, the typeof experience that they're going for.Because if they put beautiful photos upthere, beautiful colors and all that typeof stuff, it can be misleading.As if people can see it be like, oh this looks great.But they might be only evaluating it fromthe perspective of the design, not the experience.And ultimately what matters most is the experience.That's how you really avoidfalling into the beauty trap.So in the beginning when you're creating theearly stage versions of your product, I wouldactually recommend you stay further away from particularlyadvanced or beautifully aesthetic design elements and insteadfocused almost exclusively on the function.As in instead of making it look great, justmake sure it does what it needs to doand it's okay if it's rough around the edges.In fact, in the beginning I would almost recommendthat you make it that way on purpose.Why because if your customers are willing tojump through extra hoops to use your product,even if it doesn't look great, that meansa whole lot for the longevity of yourproduct and ultimately how successful it can become.Because that means your customers are willing to put upwith a little bit more trouble now, because that painthat they need solved by your product is that importantfor them, giving you really good long term indicators thatyour product can reach really great success at scale asyou are trying to figure out product market fit.So if you remove the design elements in the beginning,that can prevent you from falling into the beauty trap.It also enables you to be able toship a product faster, because you don't needto worry about it looking great.You just need to make sure it does whatit needs to do in terms of whatever painfulproblem your customer has, they need solved.Make sure that the function foryour product ultimately solves that problem.And it's okay for it to be a little rougharound the edges, especially in the beginning, because, again, wedon't want it to be misleading, and we don't wantpeople using it for the wrong reasons.We want them to have to jump through anextra hoop if they need to in order toget that problem solved and be able to measurewhether or not they're actually doing that.If they do, that's a really good long term indicator.Now, let me show you an example of areally successful product that has, in my opinion, reallynever looked great, giving you a little bit moreconfidence that a strategy like this could be successful.And the site that I'm going to use as my example,which I'm also going to pick on but complement at thesame time as Craigslist, if you're unfamiliar, it's one of themost successful ecommerce websites out there to date, and I'm goingto share with you some performance statistics for the site aswell, too, to back up my claim.But have you ever seen craigslist or used it before?There's not a whole lot going on.It's pretty basic.In fact, it almost looks like to me, a sitethat was designed and built in the 1990s, but thesite still looks like that today, I promise you that.But it's very easy to use, and for itshardware market customers, it solves their problem very effectively.I've used it many times myself.If you need to sell anything to anyone, andrelatively quickly, without needing to jump through a wholelot of hoops in order to get that listingonline so that you can get down to businessrelatively quickly, craigslist is undoubtedly your site.So let's talk a little bit more about theperformance statistics and success that craigslist has had.So I can prove to you through thenumbers that they really haven't needed at avery beautiful design and really highly prioritized aestheticin order to achieve this level of success.Now, according to statistics about Craigslist from similar web,they generate hundreds of millions of visits each month,at least hundreds of millions of dollars in revenueevery year, and are still considered to be oneof the most successful, if not the most successful,ecommerce website of all time.So despite the fact that this website still looks likeit was designed and built in the 1990s and reallydoes not have a lot going on from a designand aesthetic perspective, it has been ridiculously successful and stillcontinues to do so to this date without having updatedto really change the design all that much.Still very simple, still very basic, does whatits target market customers need to do andbecause of that, it's been hugely successful.So let this be an example that your product doesnot need ...