Clay Shirky on arrogance and humility in design:
MySpace demonstrates that users prize participation, even at the expense of clarity.
I couldn’t agree more about the lack of clarity part; MySpace is just a terrible user experience. But I think it’s just popularity that encourages people to use MySpace; it’s a case of ‘everyone else is doing it so I’d better do it too’. Sure, the participation and social networking are important but if the interface is bad, and there’s a better alternative, people are going to take that alternative. I know a lot of people who’ve left MySpace for Facebook because Facebook is more pleasant to use.
Update: Clay says that ‘design is arrogance. The designer says, I know what you want better than you. Here it is.’. I think a better word is insight: insight and confidence.
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October 14, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Clay Shirky
_Sure, the participation and social networking are important but if the interface is bad, and there’s a better alternative, people are going to take that alternative._
This is not true, at least not in MS’s case.
The MS userbase still dwarfs Facebook, and most FB users are not defections from MS. You can dislike MS’s design (easy to do, god knows), but it’s going to be hard to explain its popularity without reference to MS giving its users a high degree of freedom to do as they like — the sources of the bad design and the source of the success are intimately linked.
October 14, 2007 at 2:13 pm
James
@Clay: thanks for the comment.
By ‘better alternative’ I mean something that provides at least as good a feature set, and a *better* user experience. I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that, given time, this sort of alternative is going to win out in an otherwise level playing field.
Right now, the playing field for MySpace and Facebook isn’t level. MySpace has a huge competitive advantage in that popularity tends to breed popularity. People are on MySpace because other people are on MySpace. There’s no arguing the point that MySpace gives people a lot of freedom; my point was that Facebook gives people a lot of the same freedom without some of the difficult interfaces and that this could easily be a major point in Facebook’s favour in the long term. MySpace knows this: on the UK site at least, they’ve started offering a new ’skin’ which is much cleaner and simpler than the old one.
By the way, I don’t really see this in terms of defections from one site to the other: I still use both
And the title of the post, ‘clear as mud’ was a comment on MySpace’s lack of clarity in the interface, not on your article, which i thoroughly enjoyed.