i think that visual design is indeed not that important compared to the identity building and social tools that enable social sites. Visual designers are often an elite breed. They have been through the grilling of making sure things are pixel perfect or proportioned correctly in the grid. Give a group of non-experts an attempt at designing their own site and maybe one or two will have that eye. At the end of the day their personal expression is more important than reaching some unspecified visual design level.
Also i guess i have only addressed the users of these platforms, as for the platform builders. Yeah myspace looks like shit, so does hyves. I think the owners have not specifically made that design choice (although i may be wrong) but they accepted their own default level of design from their designers. When they had success, “why break something that’s not broken?”. j

‘Why fix something that aint broken?’ will not work forever in the evolving online world. If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

I dont think there’s a single explanation to the MySpace paradox. Lets call it a perfect storm of broadband, market timing, etc leading to a tipping point.

The question to me should not be ‘Why doesnt visual design matter?’ but what lessons can be learned so that visual design can move on from the goals of good traditional design practice, to a more context-applied approach.

The internets enable us to do the same things we’ve always wanted to do, just a little more easily. I find a lot of value in explaining a phenomenon by trying to find its source. Personally, I think MySpace inadvertently played in to the kids within us who want to build a rough & ready treehouse. Now, would you be happy enough to put your treehouse together yourself or would you want to get some high end feng shui designer in so you could impresses your teenage friends but lose a lot of the personalization?

To stretch the metaphor a little. Could MySpace be the first set of treehouses as we as a society take the first tentative steps from the 1st world home and set off out to define ourselves in the 2nd virtual world?

I think what we are seeing is that the internet is evolving. Early on, the internet was more of a playground, a place people went in their spare time to “poke around” and find something fun to do. As a result, there was an explosion of visually appealing, visually stunning web sites that drew you in with their “pixel perfect” designs, but which lacked much in the way of content/functionality.

Now, the internet has become an integral part of our everyday lives. We use the internet because we HAVE TO or NEED TO, not just because we WANT TO. Sites like Google succeed because they do what they do very well. There isn’t any clutter to get in the way of getting what you need. Perhaps MySpace is benefitting from the same phenomenon: the appeal of its functionality far outweighs its sub-par visual design.

As much as I enjoy a “beautiful” site, I spend much more time on sites that are “functional” and don’t spend much time worrying about wishing they looked better.

Sorry, that last paragraph was far from eloquent; the dyslexic engineer trying to explain himself.. paradox (o;

To put it another way, Josh’s concept of Social Design would seem to me to be an activity centered design process focused on people’s desire to express themselves, relate with others and ultimately make people feel like individual’s yet not alone.

Pauric…

I’m trying not to ask “Why doesn’t visual design matter?”

I’m trying to ask “When does visual design matter? And when do other aspects trump it?”.

(this is definitely getting into the contextual realm)

It’s a subtle distinction, but critical. As I said, my conception of social design is that it builds upon what we know about visual design, but also goes beyond it in that it doesn’t have to rely on visual design in order to work.

Thanks for the pushback…I’m still refining my thinking here, and this is all good food for thought. BTW: your explanation (#4) is really clear to me, and echoes what I’m getting at.

John S.

I feel the same way about functionality. That’s where I spend most of my time: on site who have the functionality I need (with or without visual splendidness)

However, it’s a really tough discussion to have, because there’s always the “well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t look great, and if we really cared enough we would nail all aspects of the design”. I agree with this, even though the evidence clearly shows that visual design isn’t always the highest priority for use.

My bad, of course visual design matters. I’d be out of a job otherwise. What I should have said was ‘When is visual design less of a priority?’

It’s probably worth adding, as an historical note, that one thing that can be said to be “web 2.0″ is a rejection of the dotcom era’s esteem for “high” visual design.

The dotcom era, roughly, was when people first started really caring about what a web page looked like visually (e.g., starting with Netscape 3.0 and the visual layout capabilities of HTML tables and images). But, then the dotcom bust really opened a lot of people’s eyes to how little “high” visual appeal correlated with successful websites / web companies.

I think visual design always matters, but it’s also always subject to fashion trends. Low design is always more widely accessible to individual’s fashion tastes than high design (and, low design tends to be more practically usable).

In general, the web is still very textual, and it’s fashionable and practical (think: bluejeans) to produce sites where some kind of readability is the dominant goal of the visual design.

MySpace works visually in that in allows individuals to do their own designs: each MySpace reflects some individual’s visual aesthetic / fashion.

But, to the degree that visual design is communication design, or experience design, or information design, etc., the larger the website, the more likely there are specialists representing some or all of those rolls, and the role of the “visual designer” might be more limited to look and feel / emotional design.

Aesthetics are not so important to a service like MySpace. The appeal is not it’s look and feel but it’s ability to connect to others. People just like to belonging to something. In an individualized apathetic world one the way to avoid isolation is to lower the threshold and offer unlimited socialisation and popularity whether one partakes or not. MySpace fills that needs quite well, despite a crappy design. Appeal trumps quality every time, unless quality is one of the major appeals.

One design issue that has some importance for such sites is usability and here MySpace passes by the skin of it’s teeth.

If you look at Google Calendar which is also a social site/webapp you’ll see that attention to detail and design is not lacking, well not as much as MySpace. In fact Google Calendar would most likely have failed if they hadn’t put in the extra effort. This is in part due it’s branding and their applications look and feel need to at least match this. But because it’s primary focus is as a personal app with social capabilities it’s interface requires a high level of quality in design and production. This is clearly a case where quality itself is a major appeal.

I have had experience in visual design for mostly e web 1.0 and shooping experiences for about 7 years. Lately I have worked as an experience designer for two different web 2.0 social projects. The biggest problem from my perspective is the sequencial development methodology in place for most companies. I personally like to include visual designers in the experience creation process.

It is highly important for anyone involved in the creative process to have an bird’s eye view of the whole experience. As words, visual desing carry a highly semantic value for the user. Experience and visual should not live in a divide or disconnect. But on the contrary should be developed in parallels feeding from each other.

About myspace. Most ppl are stuck within a system they have put so many hours and effort to develop. It is the first time many have been able to gain a presence in the internet and to visualize a community. Its “stickiness” for this two reasons is incredible. A rigid system that works 80% of the time which locks users and their communities. Although it is poor in execution the effort to move you and your community into a new system overcomes the frustration of usability issues like the image upload… for example.

Myspace is successful because it looks like what a teenager’s bedroom looks like. They simply cater to their audience in setting what their audience expects or is familiar with. Myspace is austute that way. However, go to a retail setting or music download place and try to get away with that look.

Consider human nature: when a person goes out to a bar or a party, they want to look good. Looking good to them trumps the look of the place they are going. People, like websites, want eyeballs looking at them. These social websites understand their users because they pay more attention to them than they do to their own notions of what ought to be. And so they have put resourses into letting the user’s determine how they, the users, are percieved by virtue of how they “customize” their page.

The notion of visual design must first be filtered by the idea of user-centric design.

Some sites know when just to stay out of the way. Myspace has such huge brand gravity because they have had the discipline to cater to what is important to their users.

Consider that if myspace was slick and shiny, how would that have affected the perception of their brand. The genius of myspace is that they either had the insight and guts, or the ignorance and luck to let the user’s do all the branding work for them. And branding in a social setting is all about personal customization.

If it does not *communicate* towards a goal – its not working – suggest this applies to creative, copy and features. The key – clear communication.

I couldn’t agree more, at least Facebook is easy on the eyes. I think this is one reason why I have steered clear of myspace, there is just too much clutter (especially for people with design backgrounds).

This is a shameless plug, I know, but we launched a social community trying to keep visual aesthetics in mind while promoting an idea we believed in. Jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon of gradients, reflections and making everything as bubbly as possible was not how we wanted to join the web 2.0 world!

A couple of points:

1. Although the Web seems like it’s been around for a long time, it’s very new historically. Technological innovations are always driven by technology first – design comes later. Think of Henry Ford’s Model T that was hugely successful, even though it came in only one style and color. When GM later introduced a variety of models, colors and designs, they rapidly gained market share. Ford was completely baffled by this because the GM cars weren’t any better at transporting people. Think of the success Apple has had with the iPod. It doesn’t really play MP3s any better than other players, but it’s design very much appeals to it’s market.

2. For MySpace, design is an answer to a problem that doesn’t currently exist. They are the only real players in a totally new category and kids have no other choices at this point.

3. Web design is fundamentally different from traditional media. Design for the Web encompasses not just graphics, but navigation and ease of use. It conflates graphic design with environmental and product design. This process has not yet matured.

4. A static designed Web 1.0 crashed on it’s own hype. Web 2.0 is emerging as a dynamic, interactive environment, not just a series of cool pages. The current volatile transformation of online media – music, film, TV, etc. – will morph into a very design-driven industry once the technology and business components shake out and settle down.

evden eve nakliyat

araba kiralama

very nice informations.thanks.

I couldn’t agree more, at least Facebook is easy on the eyes. I think this is one reason why I have steered clear of myspace, there is just too much clutter (especially for people with design backgrounds).