This whole critique is based on a fallacy: aesthetics and usability are not the same thing!
I don't see anything non-functional on the linked site at all. It just uses fonts and colors that aren't currently en vogue among the elite web 2.0 cadres. There aren't any background gradients. The text is white on black (horrors!) and somewhat larger than is fashionable these days (though why that should be a usability problem I don't know). It doesn't artificially restrict the text column to half (or less) of the browser width.
The worst thing is that there isn't even a shred of usability evidence anywhere in the post. When the author says that Jakob's site is "unreadable", what he's really saying is that he doesn't want to read it because it doesn't conform to his norms of aesthetics. It's like Picasso refusing to study Da Vinci because clearly he didn't grok cubism.
No, they are not the same thing, but that doesn't mean they aren't related. If you have a very negative aesthetic reaction to a web site, it will affect your use of the site.
Don Norman talks about this in his book Emotional Design. Everything we use elicits some kind of emotional response in us, and that affects our experience with the thing. Something is not "usable" if it's so repulsive that no one will use it. In this case, the goal of Jakob's site, for him and for us, is for us to read the articles. If we don't want to look at the page for more than 30 seconds, it's difficult to accomplish that goal.
But that's not "usability", it's style. Is style impotant? Yes. But it's entirely possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your ideas about "ugly" are the same as other peoples'.
The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly, frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.
I agree that it's possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. But it entirely depends on how that software is being used.
In the case of a web site, Jakob says it well (from the same article I linked above):
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for
survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave.
If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company
offers and what users can do on the site, people leave.
If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a
website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer
users' key questions, they leave.
I would add: if the site is ugly, people leave.
Your web site might be "eminently usable", but if people don't read it, it's a failure.
No, style and aesthetics are intrinsically tied to usability and studies have shown this again and again. Check out Malcom Gladwell's Blink for a few colloquial examples. For more formal research studies, email me.
I don't see anything non-functional on the linked site at all. It just uses fonts and colors that aren't currently en vogue among the elite web 2.0 cadres. There aren't any background gradients. The text is white on black (horrors!) and somewhat larger than is fashionable these days (though why that should be a usability problem I don't know). It doesn't artificially restrict the text column to half (or less) of the browser width.
The worst thing is that there isn't even a shred of usability evidence anywhere in the post. When the author says that Jakob's site is "unreadable", what he's really saying is that he doesn't want to read it because it doesn't conform to his norms of aesthetics. It's like Picasso refusing to study Da Vinci because clearly he didn't grok cubism.