MySpace’s UX-Induced Death

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778 300 Adrian

A great read on possible reasons behind the failure of MySpace.

It brings up an interesting point that good UX design does not necessarily mean giving users exactly what they think they want. It means giving them the tools to do what they want to do, presented in as simple a manner as possible.

Excerpt:

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 bullsh*t as possible, and it turns out they didn’t really want what they thought they wanted.

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Author

Adrian

Adrian, or AJ, is the founder and Director of Technology of Pop Digital. He has spoken at tech conferences around the world, and published numerous articles about Agile methodologies, UX design, Information Architecture, and Web Development.

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