Two years ago, a friend of mine told me that I’d be blown away by what his sister did to customize the desktop of her PC. He knew that I was interested in topics of kids’ design practices in their everyday lives and in issues of usability. I don’t remember the specifics, but what he described involved an onslaught of bright colors, unreadable text on contrasting backgrounds, and pictures and file icons scattered about chaotically. In short, her desktop probably violated just about every principle of visual design and was probably unusable to anyone but her. His point, though: kids’ desire to appropriate a space, to make it their own, was a key factor to consider in the design of systems intended for this audience.
To anyone who has seen a teenager’s home page on MySpace, neither the above anecdote or the insights drawn from it may be all that surprising. I recently read an article in BusinessWeek Online entitled MySpace: Design Anarchy that Works that makes the following argument: MySpace’s success can be attributed partially, if not totally, to the founder’s choice to provide people nearly unlimited customizability in the look and feel of their pages:
Regardless of its aesthetic consequences, this customizability is one of the site’s most attractive features, and the do-it-yourself sensibility of the site resonates with the audience’s desire for self-expression.
I had a chance to see this upclose while doing participant observation at a local youth program. During their free time, kids frequently logged in to MySpace and showed us their pages and some of their friends’ pages. The pages were cluttered with pictures. Embedded audio and video clips pounded my senses. And pages that required lots of horizontal scrolling were common.
One of the most interesting points that Jesse James Garrett makes in the BusinessWeek article is that the rather poor design of the default pages on MySpace encourages this practice:
If the default presentation and the common areas of MySpace had cleaner, more professional designs, users might hesitate to customize their spaces, feeling intimidated by having their amateur design work side-by-side with the professional-looking defaults. Instead, the unpolished style invites users to try things out, telling them they don’t have to be professional designers to participate.
Garrett admits that it’s a “mystery” if these decisions were intentional. But regardless, he’s on the verge of claiming that the breakdown of one part of what is thought of as a component of good interaction design, specifically the visual design aspects, is what leads to people’s enjoyable experience with the site. Of course, good visual design is only one aspect of good interaction design, so I am curious to understand how well designed the tools that enable this “design anarchy” are.
Furthermore, I am still not sure how much it matters. Academic researchers who have explored the importance of good usability for children and kids have argued that it does matter. But, I have to think that very few kids and teenagers care very much that their friends’ MySpace sites are designed poorly according to current standards of HCI. There are a lot of nice research questions to investigate here. From the perspective of kids and teenagers using MySpace, how much does usability matter? Despite the wide adoption of MySpace, what, if anything, don’t they like about the site? What, if anything, do they find frustrating in the process of design?
(thanks to Ypulse for the pointer to the BusinesWeek article).