Rethinking MySpace
by AlexaMySpace bashing seems to be a favorite pastime, especially among “designers” who can’t comprehend the appeal of a star-splattered, blinking, emo-blasting profile page. I personally believe that there’s always something interesting to be learned when we step outside of our usual circles, and so I jumped at the chance to be part of this redesign. Although I am not the target user, as I quickly realized, MySpace had played an important role in my life, so I was eager to understand MySpace, its users, and how to better support them.
Being the interaction designer on this project demanded a great deal of empathy for a user base that is incredibly diverse but often surprisingly different from myself or my Facebook friends. The sheer number of users that would be impacted by the redesign made this project a massive undertaking. I look forward to sharing more about the challenges and design decisions that drove this redesign in the near future.
For now, I’m excited that this work is becoming reality, much thanks to my colleague Ryan’s close collaboration with the MySpace team and Sequence, our visual design partner, over the past 6 months. Congrats to all!
Adaptive Path News
MySpace Press Release
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June 17th, 2008 at 3:34 am
I would be very interested in your upcoming thoughts, since I want to understand myspace. keep us up to date and enjoy your work
June 17th, 2008 at 6:32 am
My my Alexa and AP team, congratulations on the imminent launch of the redesign. Hope this opportunity will help the UX and design community worldwide embrace the opportunities and impacts that can be enabled by a proper design effort.
Kudos on this work and your UX intensive week (I am missing it :()
June 17th, 2008 at 11:06 am
[...] on the web. What a challenge for these guys. They blogged about some of the projects obstacles (See Rethinking Myspace, Myspace & Creative path, The Shelf-life of Social Networks) but in the end, it seems as though [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[...] consultora en arquitectura de la información que publica papers de referencia en su área. Como explica Alexa, repensar la estructura y funcionalidad de MySpace supone empatizar con un grupo de usuarios que [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Alexa, this is indeed very exciting! I agree with you, MySpace bashing has become very common, I would liken it with Windows bashing - everybody says negative things about it, completely forgetting that it has a significant majority on the market!
One question: Will this also affect the rather new MySpace Mobile experience? I have to say that I was quite positively surprised what MySpace came up with.
One request: I know that a lot of your research for the redesign will be confidential and highly relevant to maintain a competitive edge, but it would be fantastic if you could share some of your insights on the particular target audience of MySpace - as you stated yourself, this crowd can be much more different than people might realise, so I am very keen to learn more about them!
June 17th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hi Mattias, thanks for your comments! I find it ironic that people will say, “MySpace is trash, I don’t even know why it exists” (examples) when it still attracts 115 million users a month. There’s got to be something there, right? We’ll definitely be sharing more insights about MySpace users as soon as we’re able! As to your question, as far as I know, the MySpace Mobile experience has been developed concurrently with the redesign, so I imagine it’s been influenced by the redesign efforts. -Alexa
June 18th, 2008 at 12:10 am
hi Alexa, it would be great to know what were the paradigm shifts you guys took. Looking forward to more of this!
thanks, Soo
June 28th, 2008 at 12:55 am
[...] is rolling out their new re-design, as of yesterday, which the brilliant folks at Adaptive Path played a large part in. I’m always impressed by their work, but I was surprised by the screenshots of the redesign I [...]
July 15th, 2008 at 9:35 am
[...] Myspace antes del restyling gracias a los chicos de Adaptive path. Especialmente una chica llamada Alexa . Era un desastre. Super complicado incluso para darse de alta. Pero triunfaba, si que triunfaba! [...]