Does design really matter?

It seems that functionality beats design. One of my favorite is plentyoffish.com (the biggest dating site on the net). From a designer's perspective the site is a disaster, but yet, the page earns $10 million a year and is developed by only one guy.

This would indicate that a user does not care about design. If you provide users with the what they seek then you don't have to have a good design.

Another example of disastrous design is MySpace - horrible HCI, horrible design, but they have millions of users.

Will this change? Does design matter?

Some indicators tell that the web is moving into a good direction, at least with Facebook and Orkut, both these million-user web-applications are well designed. Basecamp is also a good example of a well designed (and very popular) web application.