Does Experience Really Matter?

I spend a ton of time talking about how important experience is and why it will make you smarter, stronger, and better in bed. Then I spend time on sites like MySpace and I wonder “Damn! Does it even matter?!?!” MySpace is a train wreck from a user experience usability standpoint. My latest annoyance is when you type in your password incorrectly you get this very helpful error message: “You Must Be Logged-In to do That!” Awesome. The pages are a disaster, the site is constantly erroring out and it uses almost no Ajax to speak of so the MySpace experience is: click…wait..white screen…terrible music/background/fonts…click..wait…white screen…even worse music/background/fonts…rinse…lather…repeat.

And despite all of this MySpace is still gigantic. According to compete MySpace’s traffic still dwarfs Facebook’s, which most people would agree has a better user experience. So what the hell is going on? Does UX not matter?

Part of the problem is that MySpace was first so it could be a crappy experience and no one cared. But they also made a very interesting use of rich media. Friendster (the real “first”) blew it and MySpace stepped in by giving people full control over what their pages looked like. That included customizing everything and adding all kinds of video and music no matter how annoying. People controlled their own experience and even if it was bad, it was still theirs, which is something to keep in mind.

Of course the experience matters. If it didn’t people wouldn’t buy fancy cars or overpay for Apple stuff. By nailing the experience you can set yourself apart from competitors and instantly build a brand. But there’s something to be said for letting your users control their own experience. As you build your own RIAs I think that’s something to consider. If you can give your users the tools to customize their experience in a way that keeps it usable, you’ll have hit on something very valuable.

[tags]Experience, MySpace[/tags]

http://www.brandonellis.org/ Brandon Ellis

Hey Ryan,
I was gonna write something about mySpace and how the majority of it’s user prolly aren’t *deep thinkers* but no matter how nicely I tried to put it, I still ended up sounding like an A-Hole.
http://www.deitte.com Brian Deitte

This reminds me of the article Worse is Better. It focused on programming languages, but people use the argument everwhere. Here’s a counter-argument: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807
http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

Although I think user experience is the most important priority of the designer/developer, it’s only one of many things important to the end user.

Examples of where UX takes a back seat:
- MySpace: people use this because their friends do. Why switch for a better experience if you don’t have friends on Facebook.
- Linux: It’s open source (so it’s affordable) and you feel like you are sticking it to the man
- Not using online banking: At least my banks web interface rocks, still many won’t use it because of lack of trust/knowledge of internet security

With that said, when launching a new product, creating a better UX will definitely be your biggest advantage over competition in the long run. People make a ton of decisions based on appearance. A great UX will help make choosing your product an easy decision for new customers and at some point a big enough reason to switch for competitors customers.
http://www.hobbyphotographytips.com/ Bass

I totally agree, experience does matter, but not as much as you would think always. Being able to customize things really appeal to people, and makes up for the lack of experience.
http://www.caddistech.com/ Michael Haynie

Perhaps we need to change our perspective of what user experience really is. It appears as though for the sake of argument that we are equating usability and user interface with experience. I’ve been to a couple of seedy bars and had a better experience than I had at clubs in Las Vegas. Clearly Vegas has the better interface, but the experience wasn’t as good.

Most of these sites that are wildly popular are simple. They don’t do everything, nor do they try. It’s the less is more approach and separation of concern of peoples’ technologies, so long as they can somewhat interoperate together. The old addage of perception is reality and the old business approach of being first mover advantage is definitely at play here. A Blackberry is way better at functions of email than my iPhone, but I don’t care. The iPhone does what it needs to, and it’s simple, which is why MySpace does as well as it does. Facebook is too stale, antiseptic, and linear, but technically “better.”
http://www.southofshasta.com/blog Nolan Erck

Sometimes “make it work NOW, and make it elegant later” is the winning design. In the case of MySpace, that seems to be kind of what happened.

@Ryan, I disagree with Linux being an area where UX takes a back seat. I’ve been happily using Ubuntu as my main OS for the last 6 months or more, switching on a whim from Windows. Aside from one video card driver issue, it’s been running great, and the Gnome window system was just so similar to OSX or Windows, that the learning curve was pretty small. 2 cents.
http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

“Does Experience Really Matter?”

Only if you’re the user.

PS – MySpace is absolutely a “trainwreck” in every part of the site.
http://flexinaction.com Tariq Ahmed

Well ya, I think from a business perspective – there’s a lot of things that matter.

Market conditions matter, target audience demographics/psychographics matters, timing matters, experience matters, pricing, etc..

So as with the MySpace example – what about even the early Windows-Intel experiences? Mac users didn’t have to deal with IRQ conflicts, drivers, boot up floppy discs so that you could load up DOS with CDROM drivers loaded so that you could then load up what’s on the CD… That’s a HORRIFIC user experience, even for someone who knows what they’re doing.

Here’s an interesting story about psychographics – one of our old old legacy products has an old school business audience, comprised of people who are used to DOS/ASCII screens. So we showed prototypes of a Flex/AIR based approach as well as a traditional Windows XP desktop client… they hated it. They like their DOS interface – so to keep the product moving fwd we’re using the latest and greatest but making the interface look DOS’ish – but it’s just a skin/theme.

Likewise with Vista and Office 2007; people hated the new approach… simply because they don’t like change. Once they’re used to something, even if it’s inefficient, they want to stick to it.

But when making a new product – if first to market isn’t your main strategy, a good user experience better be a part of it. E.g. Google came out of now where in a hugely crowded search engine market and crushed everyone… they offered a superior search experience (simple, fast, accurate).
http://www.articlesgarage.com Mike

I think is important to consider the target of the site. Not all the visitors of a website are bothered by the usability of the site because they just don’t know what usability is. Is that simple.
They don’t find it wrong because they don’t how is should be. I think is the same with Myspace and many other sites. Also consider the age of the average Myspace user. They are not programmers or web designers or usability experts. Just my opinion though..
http://greydogmods.com/wordpress damiende

I think myspace is bad. But I think facebook is worse.
The way facebook handles all those small programs sucks big time. Every time I log on someone has dropkicked me or wants me to do some movie quiz.
http://frankieloscavio.blogspot.com Frankie Loscavio

MySpace has a terrible user experience, but it is great for finding new musicians. Facebook in my humble opinion is worse than MySpace in many ways and doesn’t offer much other than sending a beer or something. But these are just two examples of sites like this. The majority of sites out there look like they where made by Borat using the blink tag and on fire, but it’s not any surprise really that people would follow or use these. They don’t know any better usually. The best way I think to get them used to sites with better usability and better user experience is to make them this way. I also notice that a lot of times people build sites or do prototypes for sites that only have small amounts of information and never really consider the real usage of sites by millions or dare I say billions of users. Well, the truth is that we as users really use the F@%k out of some websites and it would be nice to use tools that have been well planned out in advance. Thinking about usability is extremely important but yes if people don’t what they are missing thenhow wil they ever know? I’m not saying user are stupid. Not at all. I;m simply saying most people just want to do what they do and do it they way they know how. If they like something alot of times they may not even know why. Anyways, this could go on and on. I just think some real planning advance and designer and developers using their own creations would be nice instead of building poop for others and then saying whoops we have too many people now to fix it. Also MyCokeRewards.com might have one of the worst experiences ever in my opinion. Loading… Loading… Animation… Loading… Animation… Loading…

WTF
Sorry for the rambling hehe.

Ryan Stewart – Mountaineer Coding

Just an average guy trying to drink above average beer.