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In his 2004 AIGA magazine piece It’s Good to Be Bad, David Volgler observed a troubling trend in web design. Pointing to six popular but ugly websites (including the infamous hampster dance site) Volgler said he’s “haunted by a troubling question: does a website have to be well-designed to be popular?” The six sites that Volgler mentions are all, by any reasonable aesthetic judgment, ugly. Even worse, they’re annoying. But does ugly and annoying mean poorly-designed?

Robert Scoble recently raised a similar point concerning Craigslist, MySpace, and Google. He suggested that in some cases ugly sites are more appealing than pretty ones because they are more authentic, less commercial, and look like they were done for love instead of money. Here Scoble questions a major tenet of design by suggesting that ugly is not only not bad design, but good design.

Discussions like these raise the hackles of many web designers. Andy Rutledge, in Hungry, Want another Bullshit Sandwich? responds with an argument that echoes the feelings of many designers: sites like these succeed for one reason: they executed before anyone else. He suggests that Google’s simplicity trumps their poor design, which is “unremarkable and poorly laid out”.

Jason Santa Maria, in Pretty Ugly, focuses on design as communication, something we can all agree with. However, he also suggests that good visuals aren’t everything, saying, “The plain fact is that some people are content with something that just works.”

The MySpace Problem

Santa Maria’s observation is the crux of what I call the MySpace Problem. The MySpace Problem is when hugely successful web sites succeed while looking ugly. They work, but they don’t look very good. They look as if they were created by an engineer, not a trained visual designer. The mere existence of sites like MySpace goes against some of our more refined visual sensibilities.

The most difficult part of the MySpace problem is that, despite what designers might think about it, and how they might have made it look, MySpace is actually a well-designed website. Who could argue with this? MySpace has grown faster than any site in the history of the Web, and in two short years garners nearly as much traffic as Yahoo! If that growth and popularity isn’t a metric of good design, then what is?

Still, one could look at MySpace and claim that its visual design is lacking. They could claim that if it were improved visually, the site would be even more successful than it is now. However, this is a difficult claim to make, given that MySpace went from nothing to one of the most successful sites in the world faster than anybody else. It’s hard to improve on that. In addition, the change from what it is now to something different might negatively affect how people feel about it, especially modifying someone’s personal profile page!

Learning from MySpace

Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.

Separating the looks of MySpace from how well it works is a difficult challenge. Even when we know better it is hard to do. We look at MySpace and our initial reaction is that it is poorly-designed, whether we mean to or not. In a 2003 NYTimes article Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer, talked about this difficulty in reference to the iPod:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

If design is how something works, as Jobs says, then good design is something that works well. This idea helps us understand how MySpace works. To the people who use it, the visual design of MySpace communicates one message loud and clear: MySpace is your social life. Every feature, every design element, serves to reinforce this. It may not be pretty, but as long as people can easily hang out virtually with their friends, it doesn’t have to be. So in terms of communicating value to its users, MySpace actually does a very good job.

Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it? Sometimes as designers we feel the need to repurpose and restyle content out of its raw form. MySpace, however, shows that simple exposure might be all that’s needed. Danah Boyd, who researches MySpace, writes about designing to allow for personal style: “Don’t design for perfection – design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use.”

Challenge is Good

The MySpace Problem challenges visual designers everywhere to question the relationship between looking good and working well. It turns some of our previously-held notions on their heads. This is a good thing!

We should embrace tough issues such as the MySpace Problem. We should continually ask: what makes good design? How do people use design in their lives? These questions are important to ask, not only to push ourselves as designers, but to help communicate that value to others.

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