Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business"
There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.
I take issue with the expression "UX Experts" as you use it. In fact, I deliberately invoke the "No True Scotsman" argument: If someone is an actual expert in the field, they know that what they find confusing is different than what a user finds confusing, and that what they find aesthetically offensive is irrelevant to what works or doesn't work for the target audience/user.
What you are speaking of is the "UX Zealot," exactly as you say at the end of your argument.
Note that I am not claiming that "The set of all UX professionals who are also experts is non-empty," just that if someone is an expert, then certain things apply. So you may not need to apologise :-)
And anecdote about my first experience with the intricacies of design. A company I worked for about 10 years ago was building an application that had lots of graphic elements to it. One of the colours they were using was red. It was being used throughout the application in bold ways. It looked really nice and slick. However, when we went to show it off to the partners, they were taken aback. See, they were from Taiwan (or some other nation in that region, I forget which), and they were almost insulted by the colour red. Using red was frowned upon for reasons I can't remember, but I believe it had to do with poor luck. Basically, it was bad to use the red.
It was at that moment that I realised that UX is not as easy as making it simple to use. UX isn't build around rules, but reason built on testing.
Do you perhaps have this backwards? In the West, the common association green-good, red-bad is pretty common. In Asia it is usually reversed: green-bad, red-good.
Maybe. There was a lot of green in the application as well, so that could very well have been it. It was 10 years ago, and I wasn't involved in the design. Whatever the color, it looked good design wise, but we had to change the color because of the culture.
There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.