Chasing Beautiful Design Can Kill your Startup — What Founders can Learn from MySpace
Humans like pretty and shiny design; they desire it much more than a functional one
But, pretty design alone does not hold people’s attention for long. It fails to engage or create stickiness as the shine starts to fade away. The functional aspects of design matter more over time.
The ‘Aesthetic’ Design Trap
While focusing on aesthetics, very often, teams fall into a trap.
The more teams concentrate on making things ‘pretty’, the less useful their product becomes. That is because they have less time to identify usability issues, bottlenecks and create better user flows. Many a time, given a choice between implementing design solutions that address those issues, and rolling out new features, most founders (and/or Product Managers) go with the latter choice.
Making design “work” should always be the first priority. Focusing on making it “beautiful” or “pretty” is to fatten up the chicken for the slaughter — you are setting the product up for failure even before it can become successful.
Case in point: MySpace vs Facebook
Exactly 10 years ago, MySpace was the most popular site in the US, ahead of both Google & Yahoo Mail.
By February 2007, MySpace dominated the social space with over 80% market share, had a staggering 150 million members and valued at an incredible $12 billion — a massive amount at that time. Facebook, incidentally, had only just hit the 50 million member mark.
Fast-forward 5 years, and MySpace was valued at less than $35 million, while Facebook was breaching the billion user milestone.
Where MySpace Failed
MySpace’s downfall was attributed to many reasons including a bureaucratic management, failure to open up its platform to third-party developers, increasing reports of member abuse and focus on anonymous profiles rather than real identities.
While they were all true, I believe that MySpace’s Product Design — specifically its UI and UX — were key reasons, and gave its users more reasons to switch, as no one social network dominated (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Twitter) across geographies at that time (see chart below).
1. Standard vs Customised Profiles
MySpace was difficult to use for new users. Profiles could be customised to make them more attractive and personalised. But that meant there was lack of familiarity while navigating the site — every page looked different, and cluttered, even tacky.
Add to that, it was tedious to use as many customized profiles were sometimes unreadable. Worse, many profiles had heavy elements with videos and music which made it terribly slow, that in turn led to a frustrating user experience.
Contrast that with Facebook, that offered a far more direct, stable and faster experience with the cleaner, blue and white UI. The uncluttered pages resonated well with the audience. In fact, whenever Facebook changed its design, there was furore from users threatening to quit the platform! Users clearly prefer consistency and familiarity of UI, and Facebook won.
The irony here is that MySpace took off precisely because users could ‘customize’ their profiles to make it flashy. But, flashy design alone can’t make up for poor UX.
2. Design and placement of ads
Both MySpace and Facebook introduced and experimented with ads early on.
Andy Johns, former PM of Growth at Facebook, when questioned about the demise of MySpace said,
I can guarantee you that MySpace had a lower conversion rate to signup from its homepage when it decided to sell out full page advertisements for the next Hollywood blockbuster movie… They made money near term. They lost users long term. It’s that simple.
Contrast this with Facebook, where, Zuckerberg says,
“we [Facebook] don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
With that philosophy driving Facebook’s ad strategy, feed ads were introduced in a manner that didn’t hinder user experience and in some cases, made it more relevant.
In fact, there was plenty of research that went behind Facebook’s advertising model and the result was a superior user experience. While, MySpace turned to an advertising model that users loved to hate and was downright annoying.
3. Navigation & Content Delivery
The design of the horizontal navigation bar made users stray away from the news feed (MySpace called it ‘Friend Updates’) to wide ranging interests from horoscopes, real estate and classifieds to news, weather and local restaurant listings.
Essentially, all of those various interests were designed in a way most Portals would carry them — like Yahoo for instance. By doing so, MySpace was designing itself to become more of a portal than a social networking site, where users were being driven out of the Friend Update feed. The design focus seemed to be more towards drawing user’s attention towards celebrity news and music — again much like a portal which was running counter to the new feature’s intent.
Aesthetic Design or Functional Design?
People are realizing the power of design on every level. Look, people invest money to make things, so why can’t they be beautiful? Why can’t they work?
In the above quote, by industrial designer Karim Rashid, the last line highlights the balance needed between making design “work” and making it “pretty”.
Thus, the aim is to make design more “functional and usable” and design it aesthetically enough to invite consumers to try the platform. To again quote Anton Nikolov,
“We all judge the book by its cover. The better the book cover the more we believe the content is better… Beautiful products/objects are perceived as easier to use and more valuable than ugly ones. Even if it is not true!”
Therefore, the key is to make sure that the functional aspect of design matches the expectations set by cosmetic aspects. If they are not met, if there’s a mismatch, then it will invariably lead to a unsatisfactory user experience and ultimately the product’s disuse and decline.
Avoid the Design Trap — Finding Balance
As Charles Pearson said, “Successful design has to matter, and trying to figure out what matters to people, is tricky.” Users are complicated and can have complex emotional experiences. It’s difficult to get it right.
It helps to first focus on the functionality aspects followed by usability and then aesthetics, in that order. In fact, more than even aesthetics, the design needs to be intuitive — familiar in many aspects.
Founders, CEOs and PMs need to ask, if the design solves the problem, if it is useful and easy to understand?
The 7-point guide
Here is a quick 7-point guide that we follow at 1thing studios to help Founders & Product Managers strike balance in web / app design.
- Foremost, define the ideal consumption experience well
- Limit inputs from user
- Strip away distractions
- Draw focus to the core content
- Content should answer customer questions directly and as quickly as possible
- CTAs should be present to drive the user to the next step or make choose an option
- Show motivators clearly
Design should be about creating the emotional connect. Only then can it influence behavior and create value. In fact, the very focus of design should be on value creation, aided by aesthetics.
As Sir Allen Lane said over 80 years ago,
“Good Design is no more expensive than Bad”
Interested? Start a conversation here.
Disclosure: I’m an advisor for 1Thing.io. Subscribe here to get more such content delivered right to your inbox.
1Thing is an on-demand UX/UI design company, led by India’s top design talent, to help startups & businesses design better products. Reach out to them here.
