🤦‍Vero, when bad and bulgar design serves a function.

I imagine their internal meetings went something like this.

Sometimes there is so much noise that your only option to make yourself heard is to shout louder than everyone else in the room:

«Hmm.. That’s loud, who’s that dude making all that noise ?». They’ll say.

Great, you’ve got their attention, the next thirty seconds will be crucial. If you keep on screaming and making loud noises people will get bored of you and move on, if you keep on taking but say nothing meaningful people will get bored too and go away so you’ve got to start thinking about saying something interesting enough that people will stick around.

Vero, the social network that everyone seems to be talking about is inside those thirty seconds. If they’re not nimble, people will start getting distracted by all the other external noise and leave them to rotten.

Which leads me to the point of the article, let’s talk about their, hmm, questionable design choices. Some time ago we all decided and agreed that content is king. Vero seems to have completely missed the point, your eyes just don’t know where to look. The UI is supposed to be a frame for the painting but in their case it seems to be just another painting, they’ve framed one painting with another painting resulting in a very distracting experience. This is what Instagram did very well, they made the whole experience about the user and the content, not about the app and brand .

Let’s go back to the «you gotta be the loudest to be heard» theory. In a world where design tries to put a focus on super minimalist looks, Vero needed to be the complete opposite to get everybody’s attention. The UI is the first thing we notice, it needed to be a punch in your face and the «loudest» out there. A breeze of fresh air. It’s also worth noting that the app has the same design as it did in 2015…

Wow! Look how cool this burred background is! 🆒

It feels like the app was made by a non-designer who has just discovered the “background blur” effect on Sketch and thought it would be a cool idea to apply it EVERY-FUCKING-WHWRE. And the icons man! They look like they just been stuck there!! The attention to detail has completely been thrown out the window, there are so many little design choices I dislike I cannot focus on the app itself. I cannot explain how such a distracting UI has been taken forward. But hey, it worked, I’m writing an article about the app and giving them free publicity. Their app and UI indeed was the loudest. Well played Vero, well played.

Waaaaay too many items to focus on, not enough importance is given to the actual content .

We’ve all turned over to look at them, it worked. But what will happen once our brains get used the novelty and to that new crazy (and bulgar) design? If being fresh was their only USP, then they’re doomed to follow Vine’s footsteps. Let’s also not forget how shady their team seems to be, with their CEO being Lebanon’s former president’s son (assassinated in 2005) and being involved in some corruption cases and other shady businesses.

Only time has the answer, we’ll see. But in my opinion, once the novelty factor is gone, so will the app.

PS: Their use of color also deserves a special mention, other than how revolting I think it looks, there’s over different 5 shades of that green!!! 🙃🔫
And the same feeling applies to the semi-transparent green «+» button. It’s as if they couldn’t make their minds up.

Who the hell am I? 🤔

👋 I’m Elias, an industrial design student from England interning as a UI/UX designer in Munich.

Follow me and join me on this crazy journey where I’ll talk about the arts, design, technology, and how meaningless our existence truly is.

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