Here's an interesting quote I came across today:

Usability is not everything.

If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other. Joel Spolsky

Actually I'd disagree ... Whether you design a website or a night club or a door handle, you have to consider your target users / audience.

There is a misconception about User Experience Design that if you religiously follow "best practices" you're going to design a great product. That is not true.

In some situations you'll get lucky and it might just work, but ultimately you need to understand what your users are trying to achieve in using, consuming or visiting your product.

If it is ordering a book onlinem then that's one thing. If they want to have a good time and their definition of a good time could be loud music, alcohol and dancing, then a lot of night clubs will cater for that.

But you can take this further. Think about the really popular clubs. Usually they provide something that their revelers want, whether it's a particular location, music, decor etc.

Ultimately someone sat down and thought hard about what people would like about their club, what others do not offer and then created it. Usually this spawns a lot of copy cats, but without a real understanding what they're copying they won't attract the same crowds.

So good club designers would exactly the same way as good user experience designers.

Now that would be a gig I'd be interested in doing!

Incidentally, here's an interesting article about the difference between copying and stealing design.