A lot of entrepreneurs wonder why MySpace does so well considering the poor design. MySpace does, after all, get more traffic according to Compete.com (although not according to Alexa) and apparently has twice as many users as Facebook.
I’ve never been one to admire the design of MySpace, and I think it causes a lot of confusion for entrepreneurs who are forming their companies in the early stages because that’s when a lot of design decisions are made. I see this question come up a lot from my own clients, most of whom are entrepreneurs themselves: “So, should we intentionally make our website or application ugly, just because MySpace gets away with it and their traffic is doing so well?”
That’s where I think we should be taking a closer look at MySpace, because it does create an illusion that “ugly works” when it comes to web and application design.
First off, you should understand that MySpace’s target market is the younger crowd, specifically high school students. There are about 17 million high school students in the United States. High school students have two things to they’ll spend most of their time doing: homework and socializing. So MySpace acts as the perfect medium to socialize, or waste time is what I prefer to call it. You read that correctly: the intention behind MySpace is not to get the user off the site as quickly as possible—as is the case with Google—it’s to waste people’s time.
In order to design something to waste time, it should probably have a lot of stuff to keep someone entertained. It doesn’t make MySpace’s design bad because it’s so cluttered, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I think it looks terrible, but at the same time, it works for their audience. To go a little further, you could draw the assumption that high school students have more free time on their hands; college students don’t. So if you find yourself wondering why MySpace users spend more time on the site than Facebook users, I would think about it a little differently.
You could easily say the main reason MySpace has more activity is probably because high school students have more time to waste than the college students. It doesn’t mean MySpace is a better application or better designed than Facebook. And for that reason, it doesn’t mean you should follow the design principles of any given company because your own target market and business objectives will obviously be different.
What it comes down to is this: every startup has its own unique objectives and target market. For MySpace, the objective seems to be entertainment and expression. If you look at Facebook, it’s more of a contact manager and a way to keep updated about what your friends have been doing. Once Facebook opened its doors to developers, that has been changing and moving towards entertainment. For most of my clients, the objective is to deliver information quickly and easily. In most cases, your audience doesn’t have much time to waste, so you should probably stick to Keep It Simple.
About the Author
Jared Tame is an entrepreneur who has worked with hundreds of clients on website design, marketing, and sales, and currently works with StartPal providing high-quality, low-cost website design and e-commerce solutions to small businesses and startups.