Many months ago at Pizza Express I fell into a well laid trap and assumed the second cheapest bottle of wine would be the second one on the list – below the house wine. I was wrong: The second and third cheapest bottles had switched places.

Now, check out the signup page for 37Signals’s Highrise shown below.

When I first saw this page I thought the Highrise house wine would be on the far right. It’s not. The solo and basic accounts are positioned the same as the Italian Merlot I ordered.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. It’s  logical for businesses to try and draw attention to their higher margin products. The Guardian recently did a piece on “how restaurants entice us into choosing expensive meals“. The short answer is menu layout. The same as the Merlot and 37signals.

In episode 60 of Stackoverflow, Jeff and Joel discussed three logo contests they held for various sites they’ve built and when having users vote on a logo works and when not.

This reminded me when Doug Bowman left Google for Twitter and blogged about why:

[Google reduces] each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board.
…
a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.

Honestly, I love Google’s approach. But then, I’m not a designer.

Markus Frind had a similar take on design in a Inc Magazine interview when he talked about aspects of his site that didn’t seem very user friendly:

Fixing the [site's] wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people’s profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads. “The site works,” he says. “Why should I change what works?”

The counter argument of course, was made by Gerald Ford: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” If we ask the audience on every design decision made, we might end up with a fairly ugly looking web. Just ask MySpace.