ARTICLE NO. 605    January 11, 2011

Myspace's UX-Induced Death

by

There's an interesting thread happening on reddit right now, sparked by this post by a soon-to-be-terminated Myspace employee:

For better or worse I am a Myspace employee. Today, Myspace will be laying off 60% of the staff. This comes as no surprise to us or anyone who is vaguely familiar with the recent lack of success of Myspace. I work in the Beverly Hills HQ. So...ask away...I'll do my best to keep this up to date.

There are a lot of frivolous questions attached to the post, but the most valuable question asks, "What are the reasons for the failure of MySpace in your opinion?" The first, and most obvious answer: "[T]he primary failure of Myspace was usability."

Check out the thread on reddit for the full discussion, but here are some highlights:

One thing at MS is its very departmentalized. Not being part of UI or the player team, I did not voice my opinions that they both sucked & instead left it up to those teams to solve those issues.

 

I'd guess the problem was that the people were using the features. If they were doing surveys, I bet everyone was rating highly the ability to customise their own page. And (some) people do like a high level of customisation. People bitched and moaned at Facebook to allow it too. What they may have missed is a survey of people currently not using Myspace. Because I'd bet that a reason for leaving/using Facebook instead was the clean, elegant look of Facebook, compared to the eye-bleach that most 14 year old girls turned their Myspaces into. People like customising, but they don't like it when other people can customise too. Sometimes, cutting that customisation is a good thing.

 

It's indicative of what happens when the public makes decisions about how their products are designed: 9 times out of 10 what the public collectively wants is just plan awful. The fact is most people just aren't very smart, and the more you have in a group, the dumber they get. When you have a focus group of grandmas and parents and kids all sitting in a room together, and you ask them a question like "would you like to be able to customize your website?" most of them are going to think yeah, that sounds good! without even realizing what that will entail. The sad thing is, the people who made all those gaudy, flashy, obnoxious myspace sites liked them, but then they all went to Facebook because Facebook let them do what they wanted to do with as little bullshit as possible, and it turns out they didn't really want what they thought they wanted. This should be a cardinal rule for every business: people, for the most part, have no fucking idea what they want until it lands in their fucking laps.

 

Thanks to Justin Tulk for bringing this to our attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jonathan (@first_day) is a tech-focused jack of all trades and the editor-in-chief of UX Magazine. He is also the author of Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software, published by O'Reilly Media. Through its partnership with UX Magazine, Jonathan is also a senior advisor to Didus, a recruiting and career development company focused on user-centered professionals. As well, Jonathan is Managing Director, Product Strategy & Design for Dapperly, a fashion-oriented software product startup, and he is the Principal of First Day, a small private equity and consulting company. From 2005 to 2009, Jonathan helped found EffectiveUI, a leading UX strategy, design, and development agency focused on web, desktop, and mobile systems.

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January 11, 2011
My 69 year old mother uses Facebook. She would have *never* used MySpace. MySpace is for the younger generation and predominantly about music. Facebook is for everyone and about everything - an operating system more than a destination. I personally don't think MySpace is a failure. It may be for those that have lost their jobs - never a good thing - but that's the nature of working life these days. Ventures are born, grow, evolve and die at a much faster rate. Few jobs are safe so be prepared. MySpace has been a failure for its investors. Tough luck. They took a calculated risk and lost out. They remain wealthy and will not lose sleep over this. MySpace's evolution will interesting to follow. I think management are clever enough not to want to take on Facebook and build something unique and cool.
January 11, 2011
With features easier and easier to obtain, usability, design and customer service really all that can distinguish products, and Myspace really is a great example of this. People complain about walled gardens, but who really wants to use software, rather than just use software to get things done?
January 11, 2011
I think that is a great point about having the ability to over customizing ones page, a vast majority of people are not familiar with UX and how it works and here they are "designing" their content. When you get people creating individual pages which go outside of functionality and accessibility then you get a natural reaction to sway away from difficult content / MS page, a slow but sure death and repulsion for users. What to do now though, is it that hard to see?
January 11, 2011
I agree 100% with John P. Myspace was a train wreck I could never get into because the pages were so horrifyingly bad. I actively avoided any Myspace pages because of how offensive the pages were. Facebook isn't and anybody who thinks Facebook's UI is 'unusable' can go speak to my 80 year old granny and ask her what she thinks. On Facebook.
January 11, 2011
None of you like being told you're an idiot, but none-the-less, that is what this guy said and what's more is he's right. People in groups and general don't know what they want until it lands in their laps. If you've ever held a customer service job for any length of time you'd know this. The main reason I and many other people I know left myspace is because of the horribly designed pages. FB may be Boring, but it's functional and easy to navigate, and for the most part MS and FB do same job. MS pages are a mess code wise, you can't read the content, and are train wrecks in general regarding ui. FB initiated tight controls on their look, a focused execution on user experience, and kept the core of what they were about simple. That is why they are more successful.
January 11, 2011
I just tweeted my theory about the collapse: allowing customization. I agree with kurren in the sense that it wasn't UX or usability. MySpace became like the worst of Geocities websites, but even more obnoxious because they were interactive. FB has never allowed that level of customization. Maybe that's not THE reason why FB has succeeded, but it certainly helps maintain consistency if everyone's profile looks the same. It's a relief knowing that if I go to a stranger's FB page, I will not be confronted with animated backgrounds and 12 gifs plus a video and an .mp3 all playing at the same time in the background.
January 11, 2011
"people, for the most part, have no bleep idea what they want until it lands in their bleep laps." Massively negative sentiment that I have to disagree with emphatically. It's so generalised, it's insulting. Myspace death has nothing to do with the design aspect of UX, but rather the *content* Some of the worst designed websites in terms of UX can have excellent content, likewise, some of the most amazing UX designs can be little more than eye candy. Content is king - and lets face it, in terms of User Experience, Content wins every time. The navigation / browsing / accessibility of that content is the icing on top. Yes, you can create UX so terrible, that good content can be rendered inaccessible, but that's a very small percentage case. There's nothing worse than a smug designer - if you cannot think like your audience, you've failed. What your audience wants, first and foremost, is interesting content.
January 11, 2011
kurren, Never post another comment. Thanks.
January 11, 2011
This is, quite frankly, b***hit. MySpace failure has nothing to do with UX, Facebook is just as bad for UI and usability. It was purely a series of wrong marketing decisions, poor management and lack of vision.