Design by Community

Mark Hurst wrote an intriguing piece at goodexperience.com about community-driven websites--showing information that customers care about--vs. organizationally-driven sites--showing successive layers of expensive redesigns with competing interests of design, marketing, and branding.

He says it "proves an (obvious) point about branding online: the brand is the customer experience, not the colors or logos. The [organizationally-driven] site has all the "right" colors and graphics...attempting to create an emotional experience for the user." Whereas the "[community-driven] site delivers its information in black text, on a white background, with blue text links."

Hurst goes on to say: "enough talk about colors creating an emotional experience. When people go online to answer a question, they don't care what color, typeface, associated graphics, or website domain is showing on the page. They just want a QUICK and EASY experience."

Can you guess the community-driven website (hint: their logo is the image above)? He even used it to inform his purchasing decision.