The Little User Research Project That Changed The Future Of MySpace In A Big Way
In the Press:
Advertisers Are Liking the New MySpace“MySpace’s June redesign is proving to be a turning point in the social network’s effort to monetize its 118 million eyeballs. National brands are flocking to new advertising opportunities on the home page, making MySpace the top site in online ad views last month, according to Comscore.”
Meghan Keane - August 27, 2008 WIRED EPICENTER BLOG
Sample Wireframe
In the Press:
MySpace’s New Look Helps Quell the Clutter“After years spent living with its reputation for poor usability, garish widgets and eyeball-melting page layouts, MySpace has decided to rope things in a bit.
Starting Wednesday, the social networking site will begin to roll out some enhancements to its user interface. Going live first are a new sitewide navigation bar, a new interface for its search tool and a new set of profile-editing tools that appear within a sidebar. There’s also a new home page, or “splash page,” which will be the default landing page for non-logged-in users — logged-in users will continue to see their profiles as their default MySpace homepage.
The redesign is the work of Adaptive Path, the small San Francisco user-experience firm with a long list of influential clients.”
Michael Calore - June 17, 2008 WIRED MONKEYBITES BLOG
Method Spotlight: Personas
Personas are fictitious people who represent the archetypal qualities of your audience. They provide targets for design and are generally very effective for communicating design and research activities throughout an organization.
Personas are:
- Drawn from field research
- Named as individuals
- Developed for specific contexts
- Typical and believable
Personas are not:
- Based on demographics or market segments
- Drawn from gut feelings about your audience
- User profiles or stereotypes e.g. “Soccer mom”
- A magic bullet
As the largest social network in the U.S., with over 76 million users, MySpace's decision to overhaul all of the major sections of the site could not be taken lightly. Redesigning MySpace demanded a great deal of empathy for a diverse user base and clarification of what makes MySpace unique in the saturated social networking space. The resulting redesign was welcomed by users and shot MySpace to the top of online ad views.
About MySpace
MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media Inc., is the premier lifestyle portal for connecting with friends, discovering popular culture, and making a positive impact on the world. MySpace has created a connected global community by integrating web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, music streaming, music videos, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities, and member forums.
The Challenge
MySpace's rapid and organic growth has made it a breakaway success and leader in the social networking space. This success has largely been due to Tom Anderson, President of MySpace, who maintains an open channel to the community through his blog. Today, however, MySpace is in a significantly more complex market environment with new challenges, competitors, opportunities, and a new generation of members. Combining a membership of over 118 million monthly unique users, with a self-selecting feedback channel, is no longer a tenable means of understanding the community. MySpace initially reached out to Adaptive Path for a research engagement targeted at understanding their users in support of an experience strategy. After completing this initial engagement, it was clear that the implications of our work could broadly affect MySpace's business and improve the member experience. MySpace expanded our involvement to include work on their site redesign with particular focus on the home page (also known as the splash page), navigation, user home page, user profile/editor, and search.
Our Work
Our engagement started with ethnographic user research, which included in home interviews with a variety of MySpace members. This work served as the basis for personas that helped the MySpace team gain a fresh perspective on their community, the unique value of their service, and the member experience. From there, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the sign-up and ramp-up experience for sites that thrive on user engagement and produced a resource for the MySpace team in support of their redesign initiative. At the same time, we took on the problem of friend categorization, which they were actively working on, fleshed out a series of wireframes, and through our partner Sequence, delivered three visual design directions for this feature. Following these initial projects, our engagement was extended to include key elements of the site redesign mentioned above.
Navigation
After years of feature creep, MySpace's navigation — consisting of a primary navigation with 15+ links and an infamous grey box with no less than 30 links — needed a major overhaul. Working directly with Tom Anderson and his team through card sorting exercises and other activities, we were able to prioritize, organize and increase the discoverability and findability of important features. The new navigation structure also expressed MySpace's distinctive identity more clearly: It is organized around "the spheres of MySpace" (Me, Friends, Community, and Society/World/Beyond).
User Profile/Editor
Customization is an essential differentiator for MySpace, but users have traditionally used outside resources to customize their profile code. This approach created barriers to engagement and led to conflicts with web standards. Creating an interface for customization was challenging because profile designs can vary so greatly. To allow complete customization while still offering a consistent editing experience, we proposed a "module wrapper" — a frame that appears around each module only when the user is in edit mode that provides a consistent interface for editing modules, regardless of module design and content. Combined with page-level tools, we created a robust interface that could be used by both beginners and advanced users to control the user profile while maintaining the highly personal feel that distinguishes MySpace.
Splash Page
All our work up to this point had reduced clutter, improved access, and highlighted customization. As part of this process, we uncovered a significant opportunity around their ad strategy that drove the redesign of this page. The existing ad program offered multiple placements per page, shallow site integration, and a fragmented experience. We proposed an ad strategy to compliment our experience strategy through the "hero ad," which was completely integrated into the site and reduced clutter while dramatically increasing value.
Search
Search is an essential tool in the social networking context because it enables connectivity and allows members to find friends, entertainment, groups, and event information. MySpace's existing search function only allowed users to search one type of content at a time — for example, "People" or "Music," which made it difficult to get to relevant results quickly. We helped MySpace design a new search experience where results from all sections are presented at once via a tabbed interface, organized intuitively, prioritized according to member behavior, and enhanced with sponsored results, related searches, and recommendations mixed in.
The Results
The most important aspects of our work revolved around understanding the MySpace member, their experience, and bringing specific tools to the MySpace team to design for their community. Our research gave MySpace a fresh perspective on their users. MySpace is a portal for many things — but foremost is entertainment, which includes being entertained by one's friends. We helped MySpace focus their efforts on the unique value that stems from the fact MySpace is a more emotionally connected and personal experience. The site redesign maintained key differentiators, while making the overall member experience engaging, accessible, seamless, and consistent. The redesign started rolling out in June of 2008 and was received by enthusiastic response from the press and members. Our work not only impacted the member experience, but also MySpace's bottom line. The new ad strategy generated immediate results, as documented by the August 2008 Comscore report ranking MySpace as the top site for online ad views. At the same time, the new ad strategy reduced their total inventory and sales force requirement.
The MySpace homepage before and after:
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