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Design : The MySpace problem
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
Joshua Porter
- Bokardo.com
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When it comes to some of the web’s most popular sites - is their success because of or in spite of ‘ugly’ design?
In his 2004 AIGA magazine piece It’s Good to Be Bad, David Volgler observed a troubling trend in web design. Pointing to six popular but ugly websites (including the infamous hampster dance site) Volgler said he’s “haunted by a troubling question: does a website have to be well-designed to be popular?” The six sites that Volgler mentions are all, by any reasonable aesthetic judgment, ugly. Even worse, they’re annoying. But does ugly and annoying mean poorly-designed?
Robert Scoble recently raised a similar point concerning Craigslist, MySpace, and Google. He suggested that in some cases ugly sites are more appealing than pretty ones because they are more authentic, less commercial, and look like they were done for love instead of money. Here Scoble questions a major tenet of design by suggesting that ugly is not only not bad design, but good design.
Discussions like these raise the hackles of many web designers. Andy Rutledge, in Hungry, Want another Bullshit Sandwich? responds with an argument that echoes the feelings of many designers: sites like these succeed for one reason: they executed before anyone else. He suggests that Google’s simplicity trumps their poor design, which is “unremarkable and poorly laid out”.
Jason Santa Maria, in Pretty Ugly, focuses on design as communication, something we can all agree with. However, he also suggests that good visuals aren’t everything, saying, “The plain fact is that some people are content with something that just works.”
The MySpace Problem
Santa Maria’s observation is the crux of what I call the MySpace Problem. The MySpace Problem is when hugely successful web sites succeed while looking ugly. They work, but they don’t look very good. They look as if they were created by an engineer, not a trained visual designer. The mere existence of sites like MySpace goes against some of our more refined visual sensibilities.
The most difficult part of the MySpace problem is that, despite what designers might think about it, and how they might have made it look, MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this? MySpace has grown faster than any site in the history of the Web, and in two short years garners nearly as much traffic as Yahoo! If that growth and popularity isn’t a metric of good design, then what is?
Still, one could look at MySpace and claim that its visual design is lacking. They could claim that if it were improved visually, the site would be even more successful than it is now. However, this is a difficult claim to make, given that MySpace went from nothing to one of the most successful sites in the world faster than anybody else. It’s hard to improve on that. In addition, the change from what it is now to something different might negatively affect how people feel about it, especially modifying someone’s personal profile page!
Learning from MySpace
Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
Separating the looks of MySpace from how well it works is a difficult challenge. Even when we know better it is hard to do. We look at MySpace and our initial reaction is that it is poorly-designed, whether we mean to or not. In a 2003 NYTimes article Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer, talked about this difficulty in reference to the iPod:
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
If design is how something works, as Jobs says, then good design is something that works well. This idea helps us understand how MySpace works. To the people who use it, the visual design of MySpace communicates one message loud and clear: MySpace is your social life. Every feature, every design element, serves to reinforce this. It may not be pretty, but as long as people can easily hang out virtually with their friends, it doesn’t have to be. So in terms of communicating value to its users, MySpace actually does a very good job.
Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it? Sometimes as designers we feel the need to repurpose and restyle content out of its raw form. MySpace, however, shows that simple exposure might be all that’s needed. Danah Boyd, who researches MySpace, writes about designing to allow for personal style: “Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use.”
Challenge is Good
The MySpace Problem challenges visual designers everywhere to question the relationship between looking good and working well. It turns some of our previously-held notions on their heads. This is a good thing!
We should embrace tough issues such as the MySpace Problem. We should continually ask: what makes good design? How do people use design in their lives? These questions are important to ask, not only to push ourselves as designers, but to help communicate that value to others.
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105 Responses to “The MySpace problem”
I think the Jobs quote is being misinterpreted. When he says, “Design is how it works.” and you say “good design is something that works well.” you seem to overlook that most of Myspace’s features don’t work well. They’re cumbersome, finicky… the list could go on and on.
You’re right that good design is something that works well. The iPod works well because the UI simple enough to use with one hand.
I would argue that Myspace has purposely created a cumbersome system so that it can take people through ten steps — so that it can show more ads and generate more revenue. Smart, I grant you, but not good design, in my opinion.
I agree with your final statements. Kudos!
I think it is often lost on some that design does not necessarily have to “look” pretty.
Yes, I believe that a site that is visually appealing would probably have brought a different, more refined user to myspace, but honestly, is that really what MySpace users care about?
I think the average myspace user would rather have it be “their design” with “their videos” and “their content,” even if it makes those of us refined folk feel dirty.
MySpace didn’t succeed because of it’s design. MySpace succeeded because of it’s flexibility. It allows simple users the ability to create their own customized space. The design is there as a placeholder - fine for those who don’t care, but easily replaced with a customized template.
It’s not that it’s ugly, it’s that it lets the users define their own little place of ugliness.
[…] Attention all web designers! Vitamin has released a new web article that I believe will be an inspiration and benefit to you. Its called, “The MySpace Problem and it deals, in a very balanced way, while ugly sites are becoming popular. Steve Jobs sums the answer to ugly design’s popularity and how we can attribute to making better sites; he said this about the iPod, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” […]
MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this?
Anyone who tried to upload some songs, edit a profile etc. …
Looking at someone elses profile ‘works’, but once you’re editing your own stuff, it really is the worst monster I have ever seen. It feels like it’s coded in one big Perl file, and the first revision was checked into RCS on november 1994.
But it seems that can’t stop a web application to become popular, if you’re the first to execute.
A pitty though, If I were a codemonkey at Myspace, I would have nightmares with self-induced projectile vomiting sessions every night ;-)
I agree with the “first to execute” theory. For instance, take a look at Digg. Digg is very clean and very very well designed. The v3.0 design is even better.
Sometimes I wonder if what I think is good design is considered worthless by 99% of the internet. What if 99% of internet users simply don’t care?
[…] This article tries to explain why some websites with really ugly designs do so well regarding usage. I think it dances around the reality of the situation. These sites are ugly because they weren’t professionally designed. They were implemented to be functional and to get into the marketplace (budget/time/resource limitations). The reason they are successful is because they were either: innovative, viral (word of mouth), or just plain useful. […]
Let’s not kid ourselves here… you’re making an arguement that MySpace is designed well and it works well, but when was the last time you went a whole day and a MySpace page didn’t take 15 seconds to load or got a login failure or server too busy error? It’s true that people like something that just works, but in my opinion, MySpace rarely just works.
Look at the users, i’d say a great portion of the people that use myspace are the ones that FWD all those “if you don’t send this to 100 of your friends you’re going to have bad luck forever!!!” kind of emails, and thus could care less how myspace looks. These are also the ones helping microsoft win their battle with malware… lol
Bad design / Good design - design is what works best for the intended audience and I don’t feel there is one set design structure for all.
A crappy blue bar and some white text looks good to all myspace users becuase they don’t care - they just want to be able to talk about the party last night or post pictures of them and their friends and be able to talk about stuff they can’t in front of their mom and dad or teachers. It works for them - hence good design in that respect.
I, too, think 99% of the internet users really don’t care how a site looks. They are too overwhelmed by ads, links and information in general too care if the menu is clean or the drop shadow of your <hr /> is pretty.
99% of the internet users don’t know that changing something dynamically on a website without reloading is done by AJAX and cool because there are many different techniques involved.
99% of the internet users don’t have a clue why 1% awaits the day the Internet Explorer supports alpha transparency in PNGs.
And that’s OK. They don’t have to know.
Though I still think that MySpace pages are as ugly as all the frames using my dog, my cat, my family websites from many years ago…
Jesse James Garrett has a much better explanation of why MySpace is ugly:
“If the default presentation and the common areas of MySpace had cleaner, more professional designs, users might hesitate to customize their spaces, feeling intimidated by having their amateur design work side-by-side with the professional-looking defaults. Instead, the unpolished style invites users to try things out, telling them they don’t have to be professional designers to participate.”
www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2005/
id20051230_570094.htm
Myspace offered me the incentive (as a social networking site) and the ease to begin very simple programming which I had never done before. Sure it’s not the fanciest code in the world, but it offers a way to present a few cultural tidbits that I have collected from the world as I’ve seen it. Another thing I like about myspace is the number of groups popping up with strong political messages. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see a myspace president elected in the next cycle (for better or probably worse)!
The one thing I don’t like is the pornbots which constantly send friend requests (and then redirect you to a porn site) or the hangups on pages which come and go. I also don’t know how much longer Rupert Murdoch and Co. will allow political dissent to be dissemenated through their servers. Otherwise… I’d say the success of myspace speaks for itself — when before have so many people coded their own pages?
Mike R.: Let’s assume for a second that MySpace did succeed because its flexibility. The question then becomes…is flexibility part of design? Is making an interface flexible enough for people to create their own customized template part of design?
That’s the question…if design is how it works, then I would argue that yes, flexibility *is* part of the design.
[…] read more | digg story Posted by Weston Deboer Filed in Links […]
[…] The MySpace Problem and the question of what makes good design - the veneer or the functionality? My question is when MySpace stops being cool (pls don’t say it will always be cool) then how many users will remain? […]
I’m not sure I buy this whole “first to execute” explanation for MySpace’s success. Most successful websites are actually not the first out the gate. Digg was preceded by Slashdot and Kuro5hin, MySpace was preceded by Friendster and many others etc etc.
I don’t think ‘good design’ or ‘first to execute’ are anything more than minor factors in the success of any product. Engineers and designers don’t want to hear this, but the number one factor is marketing. Sometimes a great product can succeed on its own due to word-of-mouth, but those are the extreme cases. If you have the best product since sliced bread then you don’t need much marketing. Likewise, if your product is just worthless, it won’t matter how many billions you throw into marketing, it won’t succeed.
For the vast majority of products/websites/whatever the rise to popularity is pretty simple. First a user has to hear about it. After that they may use it and decide that the effort to use it is worth the trouble/cost. The perceived value of the product tends to vary more than the perceived trouble. In other words, if someone wants to use a website, they’ll make an effort to use it despite any usability shortcomings. Likewise, an easy to use site is not going to make people want to use it.
Where design and usability really make a difference are in the areas of general feelings and first impressions about a product/website/company, and discovering new information and features within a website. Depending on what you’re doing those things may matter more or less to you, but they need to be put in proper perspective.
You get guys like Andy Rutledge railing on and on about how horrible Google’s design is, and how they would benefit so much from a ‘good’ design, but it just comes off as sour grapes from a designer who’s bitter that people don’t ‘get’ design. Well, Tyson above is right, 99% of people don’t give two shits about design. Google’s usability is fine. You go to the site, you type in a search, you hit return. The argument could be made that they’d get better exposure to their other services if they did some design work, but honestly it ain’t broke. They’d better do some pretty heavy-duty research before they decide to change something that’s familiar to people, because familiarity is another asset that’s minimized far too often by designers.
Now MySpace is a different story. Their design and usability is truly horrendous. Their main asset is their userbase. How did they get so popular? Bands. Because bands could set up a page with music and other custom content, they got their fans to sign up too. Local music fans are one of the most social and trendy groups you can tap into to hit the vital 18-35 demographic. The fact that the site is barely usable is meaningless. People will jump through a lot of hoops if they see value in it (ie. all their friends and favorite bands are on MySpace). Now they’ve got familiarity, which I guess is the main advantage for a ‘first to execute’, but I don’t think it would be too hard for MySpace to have their position usurped. After all, their core userbase is a fickle bunch. It would just take a critical mass of users to make the switch and MySpace would die pretty quick like Friendster.
Ultimately I think that visual impression is just less important for the majority of websites. I know that’s a tough pill to swallow for graphically oriented web designers, but think about some different media. Television commercials for instance, have 30 seconds to grab you and make an impression. The sensory impact is everything. Or take printed posters or billboards; they need to grab your attention and communicate something within a few seconds. A website on the other hand is a place people go voluntarily looking for a bit of information, or to perform a certain function. It’s not that design and usability aren’t important, it’s that they’re trumped by functionality and content.
I realize the Joshua isn’t making this simple of an argument, but if you accept the premise that rapid expansion/largest market share=best design, then Windows is the best OS out there. It’s essentially a tautology; consumers want the best product, the best products should be the most popular, therefore the most popular products are the best. There’s a lot left out of that equation.
That being said, I am not a designer, but I would say to all the designers out there that the lesson of MySpace is that function will always trump form, particulaly if the function fills a need that isn’t being filled. People forget that when iPods first came out, there were really no large capacity mp3 players on the market. People freaked because “They have a HARD DRIVE IN THEM!” The design is great, but really the function is what made them huge. All you have to look at to prove this is compare the increases in Apple’s iPod sales and their increase in computer sales, the latter being a need that is already pretty well served. Then, if you fill this unfilled need, you can use that base to springboard into the realm of trend-based-hyper-inflation (which is the case with both MySpace and iPods).
>> They work, but they don’t look very good. They look as if they were created by an engineer, not a trained visual designer.
Ugh, please. There is beauty in engineering and MySpace isn’t a result of any kind of engineering.
More accurately MySpace looks “as if it were created by a high school student who’s tried 5 times to pass the high school equivalency exam.”
It’s remarkable how designers seem to keep missing the most important point: Users are goal driven. You’re dead on by pointing out it works in a way users need it to; Jakob Nielsen would wholeheartedly agree.
eBay tried for years to redesign the site to make it “more visually appealing” and the users hated it. eBay users don’t want the site to be pretty; they want it to work.
Note that this kind of “working” is different from “reliability”; Friendster was way ahead of MySpace, but the old software engineering rule “Poor performance is preferable to poor reliability” is what sunk Friendster.
David, agreed, there is beauty in engineering. But, engineers aren’t visual designers, and they are often set at odds against each other (perhaps they shouldn’t be). Substitute any non-designer group you like…
I think the problem is that the writter of this blog entry doesn’t really understand design.. or for that matter web design and development.. The questions asked are sort of besides the point.. He or she is reacting against popular missconceptions..
Visual design is important, it’s presentation.. Presentation is the difference between Macy’s and Walmart… Presentation is what made Mr. Shindler so successful with that there list of his.. There are a number of studies that are showing that users don’t trust butt ugly amateurish looking websites.. because of the lack of quality of the presentation… It would seem to communicate something about the value of the content being presented.. that it is so bad. I think myspace and craigslist.. they’re not pretty… But they’re also not so incompetently bad.. One might wonder what would happen if MySpace was “designed better,” you know.. ajax based profile browsing.. which is a bit more then a purely visual design issue. What if myspace was more web 2.0…. How about a decent color scheme? You know.. the little things..
There’s some truth to users being attracted to content that looks “more real,” which clearly has a lot to do with the social networking aesthetic.. and the rise of the DIY movement.. But that isn’t quite the same thing as meaning that good visual design isn’t important. This really gets to what I’d argue is the real reason for the sucess of myspace.. which is a rather web 2.0-esk thing.. in that the value of the site comes from it’s users.. the users provide the value and content. When you look at things like microformats and what a truly open architecture for social networking might do to a site like myspace.. If you where running myspace you’d better be looking at these sorts of questions… or your days at the top might be numbered. And of course this has nothing to do with visual design…
I suppose the basic thing is just to understand the difference between Interface usability, information architecture, graphic design.. etc… And let us not forget the business plan and how all these various things work together….
Separating structure, (how it works,how its built, both of which will play a part in how it looks), from content, is the key to understanding how sites like myspace and google become so popular. It is surely possible for the utility or usefulness of a product or service to outstrip its design aestetic to the point of becoming hugely popular. Additionally, both of those sites have no real competition in areas such as free exposure and market saturation. Just try launching a visually distasteful product or ‘ugly’ packaging in a competitive and saturated market (anyone remember the Edsel) and the value of a professional design aestetic becomes apparent.
I agree again with the “first to execute” theory. Furthermore, it seems to me it’s popularity is self propagating thanks to it’s nature as a social gathering website. Think about it — all your friends are at Myspace, but you’ve found a new social gathering site that is leaps and bounds better designed and implimented in every imaginable way. You say “HEY GUYS, LET’S ALL GO THERE INSTEAD!”. Will they move? Probably not. Why? Because you’re just one person at this new site. The rest of their friends are still at Myspace. Yes, you might motivate a few to move over but then they’re stuck in the same empty boat you are. It’s so much easier to stay where you are than move someplace better. A social gathering website like myspace BECOMES popular because it’s first to execute — it STAYS popular because you’re hooked in. Moving to the competition is pointless if your friends don’t move too.. and their friends… and their friends’ friends…..
i love myspace, but i would like to see some new colors. also, i wish you could scroll through the bulletins on the main screen. it seems ineffective to show only 5 at a time.
I believe the success of Myspace and, in the same area, LiveJournal, can be attributed to two main elements: functionality and customization.
Places like Google, Craigslist, etc have the advantage of being first, yes, and that’s a big thing, but they also have the advantage of being the first that worked well. LiveJournal and Myspace have the added advantage that much of it’s functionality is social; when it works well, it works well to build on itself by connecting people.
The second point, which deals more on social and personal sites, is the ability to customize it. I’ve seen this in video games, where people can spend literally hours fiddling with how a character will look or how their space ship is decked out… hours, before ever playing the actual game. The ability to make something your own, to make it unique to yourself is a big draw to many people.
Being the first isn’t what makes a product work, exposure is what makes it work. Windows got exposure, Google got it, MSN messenger beat down ICQ because of it, Internet Explorer is still reigning because of it, MySpace seems no different.
Even though design and/or quality may get you exposure sometimes it’s just timing, knowing the right people or investing enough money on marketing.
In the end the largest mass of users will not know you, will not understand you and will not have a clue what is good or what isn’t. They’ll simply pick you just becase ‘everybody else’ does.
I really don’t have to say anything at this point about the “MySpace Problem” because much of the comments made already have made my point for me. I believe that MySpace had the right idea, at the right time, with the right marketing. But, if the “Design” of the website meant how well it works, well it really doesn’t work that well at all.
For Example: Try clicking on the “Blogs” link at the top of the page while you’re logged in. It’s been giving me an error page since the first time I noticed it. Still does. The website is in perpetual beta, quite sad.
I have notified MySpace about many problems over the past year, and none of them have been fixed. And, I am sure I was not the first or last person to mention it, either.
Since then, I have started developing a much better social network website. Still maintaining a very customizable profile, but with alot more ease and many more features. The design and flow of this website will make you weep. It’s like a breathe of fresh air.
Lifealicious, Coming soon.
[…] How it’s possible that poorly-designed, ugly, websites like MySpace can get huge popularity? Joshua Porter tries to answer on Vitamin, citing a remarkable statement from Steve Jobs: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” […]
design is not equal to beautifull. i think google’s success is due to it’s design.
i can open google page 50 times in a day and i never get tired, in fact, it’s my browser web page. i would never do the same thing with this page, even though i think it is well designed.
google design as a concept: less is more.
MySpace is ugly because people who use it are ugly. Please send me all counterexamples.
My Space is popular because the designers followed a proven plan. Stupi