Compete on Usability

How does MySpace win?

The social networking site MySpace.com is a polarizing force among design and usability advocates. There are certain aesthetic principles that ought to be universal, so how can MySpace be so ugly, so difficult to use, and yet remain so popular?

Let's get some of the less satisfactory explanations out of the way:

• It's just a fad. Well, MySpace visits keep increasing.  Its popularity may not last forever, but what does?
• Kids don't know what's good. Tell that to Nike, Burger King,  or Apple. Style and brand are extremely important to teenagers.
• Teenagers follow their friends, and rebel against what adults value. These cliches don't explain why MySpace topped other websites built for rebellious youth.

I'm not sure anyone has definitively established the secret to MySpace's success, but here are a few partial explanations that make sense to me:

• Believe it or not, it's user-centered design. MySpace has focused on the features their target audience wants, and better site design or nicer-looking templates simply aren't on the list.
• "I'm with the band." When you're talking about the American Idol, Paris Hilton generation, nothing is more important than being famous. MySpace optimized itself for musicians to set up websites, and their fans join just to watch for concert photos, score free tracks, and hope that a rock star will respond to their comments.
• It's a mess, just like a teenager's bedroom. MySpace may not be intuitive or easy to use, but it is extremely flexible, allowing all the garish colors, bizarre pictures, and trend-of-the-moment videos its users want to post.
• It doesn't put on airs. It seems odd that the main website, at least, doesn't have a better design. But that's a strength for MySpace because it keeps them close to their audience of enthusiastic non-designers. 

Cutting edge usability: where the conventions aren't

There is a large body of usability research available on standard web interface, but recent UI advances such as AJAX have many sites breaking new ground. The field is in need of new standards to help users over their learning curves.

A more interactive web will improve usability when functions related better to people's
existing mental models. For example, Google Maps allows users to grab and pull the map to
scroll in two dimensions. This is an intuitive model because it's similar to how we use
real-world paper maps, and it's clearly more usable than separate scroll buttons.

Other mapping sites quickly adopted the click-and-drag navigation metaphor, but many
common interactive behaviors have no standard. Millions of pieces of user-generated content, such as photos uploaded to Flickr or blog posts to TypePad, are created every day, and even using keyword search it's a challenge for users to figure out what content is worth their time. However, there is no standard method of rating user-created content. Digg articles may accumulate "up" ratings, but other sites give 1-5 stars, and still others, like Wikipedia, eschew ratings altogether.

Social networking sites have no standard visual metaphors to describe the rich interactions they make possible. Typically, it's all or nothing: either you're connected to a person and "in" their network, or you're "out." Filters to show and hide content among subsets of your network tend to be text-only and awkward.

The winners in the Web 2.0 space will shake out in part due to the success of their interfaces. Watch market leaders like YouTube and emerging sites like Eons to ensure your company chooses familiar design metaphors that become standards.

Don't make your products too simple

Many people equate usability with simplicity. Their premise is, "If we just make it look simpler, people will use it more." Simplicity is the current trend in Web interfaces, going back to the Google homepage and forward to Web 2.0 interfaces like Twitter and Basecamp.

If it's not right for your business, feel free to buck this trend!  People do not buy simple, they buy feature-rich. Recall also the first commandment of usability and know your audience. Products built for novices can be simple, but the same interface may turn experts off.

If your audience leans towards one end of the novice-expert continuum, that must guide your interface design.  Experts need interfaces that are powerful but complicated, while novices need simple, step-by-step interfaces. In between is a broad middle ground of users who are unhappy to sacrifice capability for ease of use.

In general, you want to find the correct balance of simplicity for your interfaces, by experimenting, testing, and building to your audience. Realize that in most cases users expect a certain learning curve to achieve competency. Finally, a balance between ease of use and features also can help you maximize revenue.

Ratings and the metagame

Much of the Web's infrastructure is based on rating systems.  When you see an eBay vendor with a positive rating, for example, it means she has honored transactions in the past. More importantly, her positive rating is something she won't want to risk in the future by messing up *your* transaction. Whether it's a "Score 5: funny" rating on Slashdot or accumulating business connections on LinkedIn, building up one's rating is a metagame that many online businesses rely on.

Yet ratings aren't for every website.  Many early search interfaces (some still can be found today) indicated match confidence with a numeric rating. But what is one to make of this "confidence?" Either a search result meets a user's need, or it doesn't. Users are more satisfied when they make the judgment themselves, based on link titles and descriptions.  The only necessary search confidence rating is the order of search results, best matches at the top.

It's common for users to rate websites -- at Digg, they do nothing but. One Digg ancestor was Web ratings system Wisewire.  Developed to compete with the expert-edited Yahoo Directory, Wisewire's system was simple and fast. Users visited sites from an automatically generated topic list, and voted them good or bad.  Ratings would build up and the best sites climbed to the top, while bad ones dropped off.

Simple, however, is not always best. Wisewire's limited feedback channel led to usability issues. Users wondered, "How can I give this site a vote? It addressed my goals, but I can't say if it will help the next person." In addition, anonymity meant users had no metagame to play. They received no direct benefit from voting.

On Digg, users have identities and post comments on their votes -- then their comments are themselves "digged" up or down. So Digg doesn't just rate websites, it rates users as well, giving them a metagame incentive to participate.