Messy is the new clean
I have long held a strong personal dislike of MySpace. I don't think they really care though - it's not targeted at me - it's targeted at a totally different demographic.
That won't stop me airing my grievances though.
One of the main reasons I dislike it is how messy it is. How utterly useless the user interface is and how much worse the users make it with their colors and backgrounds and embedded music tracks. It drives me crazy whenever I find myself accidently stumbling onto a MySpace page.
I have always been a fan of clean lines. In fact, I have just been working on the secret, yet-to-be-revealed, Touchstone user interface that will be revealed with the all new Touchstone Beta and it is all about clean, simple lines.
Over on BubbleGeneration however, he explains that clean lines are just old fashioned. They are part of the 20th century's Modernism movement. To quote:
He uses mySpace as the prime example. He states that mySpace beats LinkedIn as a real social platform because, unlike LinkedIn, mySpace allows its users to get messy - to hack up the page and distroy any trace of consistency.
Touchstone, of course, is very different from MySpace or LinkedIn. The primary setup/status windows are not about personalization, self-expression or social networking. So we can get away with clean, simple lines. That's what I tell myself anyway. I don't want to make a messy interface that people can hack up. I want it to be clean and slick.
I take comfort in the fact that Skype seems to have the same philosophy and they aren't doing too badly.
Am I the only one who thinks that MySpace chaos and CraigsList's complete disregard for aesthetic quality is disturbing and concerning? Someone save me...
Update: Daniela suggests to me on Skype that perhaps I don't like MySpace because Murdoch bought it just to drive traffic to his Fox TV sites.
This is probably a topic for another post but I don't mind that Murdoch, being an old school media guy, recognized (in some small way) the volume of traffic that MySpace could generate and purchased it to keep his media company relevant. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that the platform itself didn't necessarily deserve the popularity it received/receives (for reasons mentioned above and many others) and the fact that people like Murdoch, in general, don't understand the real power of social platforms beyond the old 'eyeballs to monetize' paradigm.
That won't stop me airing my grievances though.
One of the main reasons I dislike it is how messy it is. How utterly useless the user interface is and how much worse the users make it with their colors and backgrounds and embedded music tracks. It drives me crazy whenever I find myself accidently stumbling onto a MySpace page.
I have always been a fan of clean lines. In fact, I have just been working on the secret, yet-to-be-revealed, Touchstone user interface that will be revealed with the all new Touchstone Beta and it is all about clean, simple lines.
Over on BubbleGeneration however, he explains that clean lines are just old fashioned. They are part of the 20th century's Modernism movement. To quote:
Re-engineering was about streamlining: about cutting the fat; about removing "resistance" and "drag" created by superfluous processes, whose near term returns were non-existent.
The result, as we all know too well today, is a commercial landscape both bleak and bland: homogeneous, robotic, synthetic, and hyperrationalized, where the Barista's or burger-flipper's value is timed, measured, studied, and analyzed to death.
He uses mySpace as the prime example. He states that mySpace beats LinkedIn as a real social platform because, unlike LinkedIn, mySpace allows its users to get messy - to hack up the page and distroy any trace of consistency.
Touchstone, of course, is very different from MySpace or LinkedIn. The primary setup/status windows are not about personalization, self-expression or social networking. So we can get away with clean, simple lines. That's what I tell myself anyway. I don't want to make a messy interface that people can hack up. I want it to be clean and slick.
I take comfort in the fact that Skype seems to have the same philosophy and they aren't doing too badly.
Am I the only one who thinks that MySpace chaos and CraigsList's complete disregard for aesthetic quality is disturbing and concerning? Someone save me...
Update: Daniela suggests to me on Skype that perhaps I don't like MySpace because Murdoch bought it just to drive traffic to his Fox TV sites.
This is probably a topic for another post but I don't mind that Murdoch, being an old school media guy, recognized (in some small way) the volume of traffic that MySpace could generate and purchased it to keep his media company relevant. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that the platform itself didn't necessarily deserve the popularity it received/receives (for reasons mentioned above and many others) and the fact that people like Murdoch, in general, don't understand the real power of social platforms beyond the old 'eyeballs to monetize' paradigm.
Labels: beta, design, interfaces, Media 2.0, myspace, social media
2 Comments:
ha- i just don't like their politics - but that ideed is for an entirely different conversation.
Lately however many musicians i know (most who are not web savy) have really benefited from MySpace and it seems to work for them so now i am forced to go to their MySpace to get gig updates etc. or else i am sitting home every night reading blogs ;-)
not sure if you caught the ZeFrank conversation around MySpace this summer but if you didn't you can start
here
what do you think about Blogger? i just noticed that in posting a comment to your blog that it is 'powered' by Blogger. You do a great job at making it look and feel like your site- because you know how- i try as well and have had many people comment- how come your blog is on Blogger and doesn't look like the templates they give you and how did you get rid of the search blogger box- i just figured it out to tweak it a bit (yeah i agree it needs some work). There are some Blogger sites that are a bit scary as well.
i like it clean and slick myself and in designing enterprise applications over the years- i have learned that enterprise information workers demand design consistency and usability (defined in multiple ways).
Yes the politics issue is a whole other post - but I agree with you ;)
Can you say 'propaganda machine' hah.
I did not see the ZeFrank convo actually - I will check it out thanks. I saw his duck at the Vloggies though, does that count?
Re: Blogger - It was my first foray into blogging and therefore I used the first and easiest service I could find. It has been fairly stagnant with features for a long time and this latest upgrade is probably too little too late. If I could easily migrate I would but for now, as you mentioned, we have it looking just right so... if it aint broke :)
I agree that enterprise customers (more so than any other) prefer a consistent User Experience. So do I! So I did spend a lot of time ensuring we achieved that with the blog.
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