

How did MySpace do such a bad UI/UX job? - rpsubhub
http://www.quora.com/How-did-MySpace-with-a-smart-team-of-people-do-such-a-BAD-UI-UX-job-with-the-new-design/answer/Andrew-Chen

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mgkimsal
Chen is specifically talking about a new redesign here, not the overall
ability for MySpace users to customize everything.

What's so totally annoying about this is the UX people get overridden by the
concerns of the 'business' people. Many companies I've worked with still have
rather arbitrary distinctions which divide people and create antagonistic
tendencies between teams. Really, truly, everyone is working on the same
'business' problems, just from different angles.

Treating UX people as not understanding 'business' is insulting. Not saying
it's been done here explicitly, but as someone who's done a lot of
development, I've been talked down to enough by people who think I don't
understand 'business' or company X's particular 'business'. The only time I
don't understand an aspect of the business needs is when those aspects are
specifically withheld during meetings ("for strategic purposes", of course).

I think the UX people probably understand the 'business' of getting users to
quit leaving myspace and start using it again - for the long term - better
than any of the 'business' guys who can only measure success on daily or
weekly ad sales charts. Not saying money and ad sales are bad, but this is a
classic death spiral - increase page views (and possibly ad sizes) to squeeze
a few extra bucks out of the remaining users before they leave two.

The same network effect of people using MySpace because all their friends did
is going to be working in reverse as people quit using it because their
friends quit using it too. The absolute first priority should be to keep those
friends using MySpace, then devising strategies to get them to get their
friends back.

All this assumes the true goal of the 'business' side of things is to have a
growing profitable MySpace 5 years from now. I really suspect it's not.

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izendejas
That's because the incentives are completely screwed up (to put it in the
nicest terms): more page views (no matter how these come about) = more ad
revenue. So what do you expect many to do?

It's a sad state of affairs because the "business" folks are now resorting to
more controversial and in-your-face material that is complete garbage much
like cable news and other ratings whores on television. Think about the AOL
memo that was allegedly leaked. That's what the internet is turning into all
at the expense of high-quality content.

This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else didn't do it, but when you can't
easily monetize online, now you even have the likes of the New York Times with
huge display ads that scroll down to cover up most of your screen when you
visit their home page. Disgusting. Someone needs to change this. I'm looking
into it.

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petervandijck
MySpace allowing CSS etc. in their profiles was initially a bug. Their code
was just bad, not escaping user input.

They were on such a growth trajectory, and users loved being able to customize
their pages, that they made it into an official feature.

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jarin
I've heard anecdotally that Plenty of Fish intentionally does something
similar on their search results. The user thumbnails are generally low quality
and/or squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. What I heard from someone who
talked to him about it is they tried fixing it (cropping instead of resizing,
higher image quality, etc), but it resulted in fewer click-throughs (and fewer
ad impressions) so they changed it back.

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InclinedPlane
MySpace intentionally delegated a good chunk of the UI/UX to the individual
users. This was a mistake.

~~~
tuhin
Even twitter does that! Yet we are yet to see horrendous profile pages on
Twitter. Reasons:

1) Twitter crowd is "relatively sober" (no data to prove this).

2) Twitter does not go all out on the options. The tools are limited to a huge
extent with a majority of page still covered by tweets esp in the new design.
Hence less chance of the user to play their part.

~~~
artmageddon
I could be wrong, but Twitter doesn't allow custom CSS, cursor changes, scroll
tags, and it doesn't let you blast horrible horrible music in the faces of
their readers. That, to me, is a plus.

It's a little weird since I prefer to give the users as much control as
allowable when I write applications for them... but this has shown me that
sometimes great power is not always treated with great responsibility :)

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mgkimsal
On a somewhat related note, I 'got' how/why people were so attracted to
MySpace in the first place with the 'personal customization' aspect - my own
background, colors, etc. But I have to say it would have been even better with
one or both of the following options:

1\. A toggle to disable a person's styles to a default.

2\. An option of defining my own style for viewing others' pages.

I just went to a friend's page (after having not been on myspace in > 2years)
and it was 100% unreadable. Doing a 'select all' on the entire page made some
of the text readable, barely. Ugh.

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clojurerocks
Dont forget MySpace was THE site out there when doing these things was
considered the best business plan. Hence why Ning and a few other sites like
it were also popular. However that was a LONG time go and things have changed
alot since then.

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Supermighty
Designing for the best user experience is the same as designing for revenue.

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nir
For most users I suspect it's better than Quora's, actually.

~~~
Tycho
I had to chuckle when I saw the domain this story was submitted from. On one
hand, the technical aspects of Quora are quite nifty. But the interaction
process is one big 'wtf'. Adding new topics to your feed is baffling. In fact
for a while I didn't even realize there _was_ a personalizd feed, I thought
the majority of questions were just about Steve Jobs (must have been cause
ceoSteveJobs is on my Twitter account, which I used to sign in). Other
details, like wanting to post a question in anonymous mode, have inobvious
answers. It's a shambles (although I suppose it's still early days, and really
the content is the important thing).

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alsomike
This is a good example of how A/B testing the wrong things can kill your
product.

