DeadSpace: 7 Reasons Why MySpace is as Good as Dead

The first behemoth of social networking, MySpace—now owned by Fox Interactive Media—is on its way to its grave, with no one to blame but itself. MySpace’s popularity hit its apex in March 2008. In the following month, it was overtaken by its first real competitor, Facebook. But the writing was on the wall long before that. Web developers and architects all over knew that MySpace was doing it wrong. Surely at least a few of its own developers knew this and pushed for change. Still, MySpace was the slowest to adapt. For a site of that magnitude—including all of its systems, engineering and hacks to make it function—change does not come easy or cheap. The site was not built to do or handle what it attempts to do today, and its poor framework and conventions of interaction are a reflection of that. This is where the ever-important step of planning and laying a site’s foundation is so important. MySpace architects did not effectively build the system to be much more than a novelty. And while MySpace is not your average website, it serves as a lesson in utility for anyone charged with planning, building and running a website on any scale. If a better alternative in Facebook had never come along, MySpace would not be in this position nor would it have pushed to try to make any changes, even in the eleventh hour. People still want to connect to other people, share things they care about and display certain aspects of their life. Whether you agree with those aspects of our culture or not, they do exist, and MySpace fulfilled those motivations for a time. All you need is one competitor, however, one other option entering the marketplace, and the incumbent developers will be challenged to fight to the death. MySpace’s architects and developers simply could not live up to that challenge. In 2008, MySpace did begin to introduce features, tweak aspects of its foundation and attempt to crack down on the juggernauts of spam bots plaguing the site—but by then people didn’t care. Facebook came along, presented a better option, and people moved with little doubt that they would ever return to MySpace. Thus, in the same way it virally grew, MySpace will die by the same domino effect that catapulted its popularity. Let’s examine seven key elements of MySpace that rushed MySpace to its grave. (It should be noted that the following screenshots were purely at random and were very, very easy to find.)

1: Out-of-control design framework

Of the people you know, how many could lay plans for their own house, paint a beautiful portrait worthy of hanging in your living room or perform cosmetic surgery? Chances are, few. There are just certain things that some people have no business doing, either lawfully or for the sake of the rest of us. Designing websites is one of those things. Designers are in a unique class of professionals, and good web design is an exact art and science. MySpace disagrees, however, and allows their users to hack everything in the page until nothing is usable, legible or tolerable. Pages are riddled with high-res backgrounds, text isn’t protected, and colors, styles and sizes are fully unlocked—just to name a few. All of this creates a design playground which breeds annoying layouts that distract from the page's content. In contrast, Facebook has chosen to restrict at least the foundational framework of the site. While customization is an important aspect, it shouldn’t be allowed at the risk of the functional system—the very heart of a social networking site’s brand and reputation.

2: Auto-play music

People love music. It’s one of the few ubiquitous facets of life. In fact, Apple’s famed comeback as a technological and cultural superpower was all a carefully conceived plan to tap into our common love for music—and they rode that all the way to billion-dollar profits. In contrast, MySpace taps into music to annoy the living hell out of most of us. In fact, it should be noted that all non-prompted audio anywhere, on any page, is a widely unacceptable and an unwanted "feature."” This goes for ads, auto-play videos, and most important, unexpected, blaring music overlaid on what you might be listening to already.

3: Identities

The days of Internet handles are coming to a close. Yes, there was a time when one would be known as “Biker5445,” as systems continued to use usernames as main identifiers. Of course, Internet e-mail systems will still use some form of handles for some time. Most of today’s websites, however, no longer need to do this—particularly social networking sites. This is even more important due to recent news and events concerning privacy and security. The use of a handle is only good for concealing identity, and that doesn’t mix well in a site intended to connect people. What good can come from that policy in a social networking site? MySpace did eventually get clued into this basic, fundamental issue and started asking its users for their real name as an option: Again, too little too late.

4: Little focus on content with a horrible user interface

There’s actually too much of this subject matter to fit within this article’s short space. One could write volumes about the sheer usability and UI issues that plague MySpace. One thing is for sure, this aspect is a website killer, no matter if you are local deli or a major social networking site. In the case of MySpace, most interactions and conversations occur within a never-ending, scrolling guestbook. These “comments” also have very little restrictions and are filled with a cacophony of text, pictures, videos and animated gifs—all without any context in the conversation. Ultimately, the interface leaves everyone reading essentially one-half of an e-mail conversation between two people and no one else. That’s just the beginning. Features that are, at best, a one-time read about a person’s interests, life story, and favorite music, movies, books, television shows, heroes and foods are typically placed near the top of the page in one long column. Whether you have an interest in any of this stuff or not, you’re treated to it every time. The list goes on, but we just can’t stomach any more.

5: MySpace has cultivated a raunchy, immature base

MySpace’s culture—formed by the foundation created by its architects—has without a doubt developed an immaturity and a raunchiness that is unique to MySpace. It’s widely known that MySpace has sold-out to become a platform built around dating, which doesn’t help its state in terms of the quality of content. You can easily find all the "vital" statistics that you want from a date on most pages—everything from sexual orientation, build types, even income takes headline status. The archetypical “MySpace photo” is often mocked and mimicked today by a photo with the person in a sexually suggestive pose, with bright light and the camera aiming down from above. It’s not just about sexually suggestive material, but about the framework of how MySpace works. The site can’t be responsible for user’s content, or perhaps lack of content, but what MySpace’s architects have built promotes an underlying immaturity that is not present in Facebook—at least not yet. Coupled with all the other out-of-control elements, a light click-through of MySpace easily resembles a walk down a tattered, defaced red light district. And why is Facebook not facing this degree of the problem? Its architects have planned better. Perhaps it’s embracing the common sense of restricting anonymity. Perhaps it’s because Facebook doesn’t allow layouts and its interface to go nuts. Either way, it’s well-known that Facebook has attracted a more mature presence and left MySpace with the rest. If you have never experienced this cultural difference, click around random pages in MySpace—if you dare. Chances are, you don't need to and you're just nodding along with the rest of us.

6: Inordinate number of ads

News Corp is definitely profit-centric. Whatever soul MySpace ever had, it was sold to the highest bidder ages ago. The number of large, animated, irritating, irrelevant and sometimes offensive ads compared to what matters—content and utility—is terribly imbalanced. While Facebook has yet to turn a profit at the date of this article, it will eventually need to solve this problem and will most certainly shift its balance as well. Until the day comes when Facebook burns through its cash faster than investors can pour it in, this difference makes it an easy switch from MySpace to Facebook.

7: Spam

If there’s one thing that’s notorious on MySpace, it’s spam. The site’s spam comes in many forms, but the most prevalent are the spam bots for sex and dating sites. They pose as skanky figures, companies, scam artists, music groups and interest groups, which scour friend lists in public profiles and send out friend requests to drive traffic to their MySpace page or other shady website. MySpace came to its senses in recent times, figuring that this was annoying people beyond limits and started to ruthlessly crackdown. Again, too late. The brand of MySpace, “A Place for Friends,” became “MySpace—A Place For Sleazy Marketers.”

The Future

While MySpace's reputation is dead, Facebook isn’t perfect either. In fact, more and more people are becoming annoyed with its limitations and methods as well. It is still plagued with its own problems, some of them similar to MySpace in terms of its core usage. Simply put, there are things that “social networking” sites should be doing and they are not, along with things that they are doing and shouldn’t be. Facebook is—for the moment—simply a better option. But it’s got a thin line to walk as well, not the least of which is to actually turn a profit. With MySpace as good as buried, look to Facebook to begin making changes to address the pressures of creating more revenue. The balance between utility and profits will be tilted. The question is how much will it tilt and how much will be sacrificed when the next social networking site comes along and ups the ante?

More...

MySpace Helps News Corp Lose $363 Million [Mashable]

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Mythbusters: Website Edition

As a web designer, I routinely speak with business owners and marketing managers who are in the midst of a website redesign project for their company. During these conversations, I am always amazed by the myths about user experience and interface design that they mistakenly cling to. Many of these misconceptions are the by-product of previous website projects – leftover relics from an Internet of old. Others are more baffling, as their tenets are not now and never were true. So in the interest of championing the best practices and principles of modern website design, we’re channeling our inner myth busters and blowing the lid off five of these most persistent myths (dramatic explosions not included):

Myth #1: Visitors need/want instructions on how to use your site.

The Internet is no longer a new and unfamiliar medium, yet many companies still populate their websites with content that seems targeted to someone who has never actually navigated the Web before. When you include instructions for visitors about how to use to your website, you are adding a lot of extra words, which in most cases only serve to weigh down your pages with unnecessary visual clutter. In fact, the goal of any good design is to create an interface that is so intuitive that no instruction or explanation is necessary to help visitors move from one page to the next and complete routine processes such as making a purchase or signing up for an account. As a result, if you feel instructions are necessary, that inclination is a major red flag for serious design flaws that must be addressed in order to provide a quality experience for your user. To be fair, there are certainly instances where some level of guidance is needed. Complex interactions or applications that are truly unlike anything that has come before on the Web will require some level of training for your users, but the vast majority of websites do not fall into this category. If your site is, well, just a website (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), forego the instructions and have faith that your users are savvy enough to know and understand the well-established conventions of using the Internet.

Myth #2: These days, everyone has a high bandwidth connection.

Over the last few years, the average size of a webpage has doubled, largely due to our profuse use of images. Current design trends that call for giant, page-spanning photographs combined with the drive to deliver high-resolution images for retina displays mean that the file size of the images we are using continues to climb. Many people argue that this is acceptable because, as the size of our webpages grow, so does the bandwidth speed of our Internet connections. But is this really the case? It is true that the number of people with access to high bandwidth connections continues to increase, but the belief that all visitors have the benefit of a lightning-fast connection is nothing more than wishful thinking. There are still many areas of the country and the world that are shackled to the type of slower connections that are only a distant memory for many of us. Also, keep in mind as well that mobile visitors may be operating on a network that is either unreliable or has data download limits. In both of these instances, a website that is bloated with large content (i.e., giant videos, unoptimized images, etc.) will pose a problem. Ensuring that your website is optimized for performance is as important today as it has ever been, regardless of how fast connection speeds may be. After all, no one has ever said, “Wow, this website loaded TOO quickly for me!” Better performance and faster downloads improve the quality of experience for all users.

Myth #3: There may be some users visiting your site on a mobile device, but not that many.

Years ago – when the iPhone was still a novelty and everyone and their 12-year-old brother didn’t walk around with a smartphone in their pocket – this may have been the case. But today, visitors are accessing your website on a wide variety of devices with a range of different screen sizes. Examining the hundreds of websites that we manage reveals that an average of 30 percent of all traffic to those sites comes from mobile devices of one kind or another, and for some, it’s as high as 50 percent or more. This is consistent with the forecasts of industry analysts, who predict that by 2015 – that’s next year, folks! – the majority of all Web traffic will come from mobile devices. Additionally, not only are visitors accessing your site on mobile devices, but the same visitor is likely using multiple devices to access your content. We call this the “muti-device user”. As we covered previously in our article “Website Design for a Multi-Device World”: The multi-device world is populated by multi-device users. While a staggering variety of devices are, indeed, being used to access web content today, it’s also important to remember that the same user is often using multiple different devices to access your website – and they expect that site to work well regardless of which device they happen to be using at the time. Gone are the days of “mobile users” coming to your site only to locate your phone number or directions to your office. Today’s mobile users – and multi-device users – expect convenient, on-demand access to the same content that they can find on the desktop version of the site. Clinging to an outdated belief that “no one has a reason to visit my website on a mobile device” will quickly translate to “no one has a reason at all to visit my website at all.” Read more: Website Design for a Multi-Device World

Myth #4: You should open off-site links in a new tab/window.

This is the most common myth that I hear from clients, who insist that all links that lead to another site must open in a new tab or window. This request stems from a belief that if a visitor leaves your website to look at content somewhere else on the Web, they will never find their way back. By opening that link into a new tab, your website remains open in the user’s browser for them to return to at any time. Or at least, that’s how it works in theory. Unfortunately, I have seen this practice backfire on a number of occasions. Why would this be the case? Think of the Web as a linear experience. You move from one page to another and another. You can travel seamlessly to and from any point along  this timeline by using the browser’s back and forward buttons. But when you open a link in a new tab, you start a new timeline for the user. Having observed many website users over the years, I can tell you that the back button is a feature that they are intimately familiar with. If that user clicks a link and visits a new page, and they then want to return to your site, they will intuitively click the back button until they get there. However, if you’ve opened the off-site link in a new tab or window, then the back button eventually leads to a dead-end for that visitor. Your site, which they want to return to, is not part of their current timeline because it is open in a completely separate tab. Of course, all the user needs to do is close the current tab, and your site will be in front of them again, but I’ve seen many visitors who are unaware of or confused by this. Instead, when the linear experience of the back button doesn’t bring them to your site as they expected, they instead type your website’s URL into the browser’s address bar, thinking that something went wrong along the way. They now have two instances of your website open, so in your efforts to “help” them easily get back to your site, you’ve actually confused the user experience. Does this mean you should never open links in a new tab or window? No, it doesn’t. For example, it’s a good practice to open PDF files in a new tab because these documents feel like they are separate from the linear experience of browsing a site. Additionally, opening links in new tabs is not “wrong,” per se. It is an acceptable solution, but if you choose to use that approach, do so for a reason other than the mistaken belief that if visitors leave your site, they will never find their way back. The linear experience of web browsing – and using the back button to return to a webpage – is a well-understood convention, so don’t be afraid to let your visitors explore in the manner that is most natural to them.

Myth #5: Visitors absolutely will/absolutely will not complete a form.

The final myth we will debunk concerns web forms. Interestingly, I hear competing opinions from clients regarding forms on their websites. Some believe that visitors will not fill out a form no matter what. Others think that their users will gladly complete a lengthy questionnaire for almost no reason at all. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Gathering information from website visitors is a valuable exercise. It allows you to understand who is coming to your site so you can follow up with them, engage with them and hopefully convert them into paying customers for your business. Just asking for visitor’s information is not enough, however. Very few people will be willing to complete a form unless they have a clear understanding of what they will receive in return – and what they receive needs to be of greater value to them than receiving more marketing from you. This value can come any number of different ways, such as receiving a free whitepaper or application download or registering for an event or webinar. In each of these cases, there is a legitimate reason for your site visitors to complete a form that gives you their personal information. If, however, your form simply says, “Sign up for updates!” without any further information about what those updates entail, how frequent they will be delivered or what potential value they hold, then there is a slim chance anyone will be inclined to complete that form. Creating a valuable offer is step one. Step two is the design of the form itself. Asking for too much information will be a roadblock for many visitors, who will either perceive a form with a large number of fields as being too cumbersome or too intrusive to complete, so the best course of action is to ask for only the information you need. If you never intend to call someone, then don’t ask for their phone number because that’s one less obstacle you’ll have to overcome. The more concise and easy your form is to complete, the more likely your visitors will do so. Website visitors will fill in forms, as long as you make those forms easy to complete and provide value to them in exchange for sharing their information with you.

R.I.P. myths and misconceptions

The Web and the behavior of its users are constantly evolving. Since the last time you engaged in a website redesign project, there have undoubtedly been a number of shifts in trends and tendencies, and what you learned through that experience even just two or three years ago may not be applicable today. Because of this ever-changing landscape, the importance of working with web development firm that keeps pace with these changes and the best practices of modern website design cannot be understated. Such a partnership will ensure that the decisions driving the the design of your site are relevant to today’s Web and are not relics of a time gone by.

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