How did MySpace do such a bad UI/UX job?

Chen is specifically talking about a new redesign here, not the overall ability for MySpace users to customize everything.<p>What's so totally annoying about this is the UX people get overridden by the concerns of the 'business' people. Many companies I've worked with still have rather arbitrary distinctions which divide people and create antagonistic tendencies between teams. Really, truly, everyone is working on the same 'business' problems, just from different angles.<p>Treating UX people as not understanding 'business' is insulting. Not saying it's been done here explicitly, but as someone who's done a lot of development, I've been talked down to enough by people who think I don't understand 'business' or company X's particular 'business'. The only time I don't understand an aspect of the business needs is when those aspects are specifically withheld during meetings ("for strategic purposes", of course).<p>I think the UX people probably understand the 'business' of getting users to quit leaving myspace and start using it again - for the long term - better than any of the 'business' guys who can only measure success on daily or weekly ad sales charts. Not saying money and ad sales are bad, but this is a classic death spiral - increase page views (and possibly ad sizes) to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the remaining users before they leave two.<p>The same network effect of people using MySpace because all their friends did is going to be working in reverse as people quit using it because their friends quit using it too. The absolute first priority should be to keep those friends using MySpace, then devising strategies to get them to get their friends back.<p>All this assumes the true goal of the 'business' side of things is to have a growing profitable MySpace 5 years from now. I really suspect it's not.

MySpace allowing CSS etc. in their profiles was initially a bug. Their code was just bad, not escaping user input.<p>They were on such a growth trajectory, and users loved being able to customize their pages, that they made it into an official feature.

I've heard anecdotally that Plenty of Fish intentionally does something similar on their search results. The user thumbnails are generally low quality and/or squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. What I heard from someone who talked to him about it is they tried fixing it (cropping instead of resizing, higher image quality, etc), but it resulted in fewer click-throughs (and fewer ad impressions) so they changed it back.

MySpace intentionally delegated a good chunk of the UI/UX to the individual users. This was a mistake.

On a somewhat related note, I 'got' how/why people were so attracted to MySpace in the first place with the 'personal customization' aspect - my own background, colors, etc. But I have to say it would have been even better with one or both of the following options:<p>1. A toggle to disable a person's styles to a default.<p>2. An option of defining my own style for viewing others' pages.<p>I just went to a friend's page (after having not been on myspace in &#62; 2years) and it was 100% unreadable. Doing a 'select all' on the entire page made some of the text readable, barely. Ugh.

Dont forget MySpace was THE site out there when doing these things was considered the best business plan. Hence why Ning and a few other sites like it were also popular. However that was a LONG time go and things have changed alot since then.

Designing for the best user experience is the same as designing for revenue.

For most users I suspect it's better than Quora's, actually.

This is a good example of how A/B testing the wrong things can kill your product.