Wisdump

Dumping wisdom on design and the web

MySpace: Is ‘ghetto’ a design choice?

MySpace is a community site that allows you to setup a profile and blog and connect with friends and strangers. It’s also a designer’s and lover of design’s worst nightmare because the UI of the site is atrocious yet it boasts 17 million visitors a month (and rising) and was recently purchased for over $580 million by News Corp.

From a design perspective we have to look at it as a failure, but obviously it’s not. Why is that? Why hype ugliness? I will try my best to analyze (if you could call it that) what makes MySpace so popular and how we all could learn to follow in its footsteps.

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Originally posted on August 24, 2005 @ 12:27 pm

Craigslist: Edward Tufte’s Dream

*Note: If you don’t know who Edward Tufte is I highly suggest you read up on him and buy all of his books.

Craiglist, like MySpace, is a site many people use because that’s where everyone else is at. The community makes it worth the hype it receives, but besides the community and some viral marketing how did the design play a role in making Craiglist a huge success? With MySpace it was hard to find anything about the design that lead it to fame, but with Craigslist I think we can see that the design played a significant role in making it an online leader for classified ads.

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Originally posted on September 12, 2005 @ 9:22 am

Being the Hype

Two weeks ago I started a series that I knew would ruffle some feathers. I knew there would be people that would agree with me and I knew there would be people who vehemently disagreed with me. I knew there would be people telling me that I was simply writing this series to get traffic (ummm, I like people reading my stuff, do you?) and others that would simply resort to calling me names. In the end though I am glad it worked.

We are a very emotional community. It is easy to get us excited and even easier to piss us off. Tell us you have a new redesign coming out and we get excited and the anticipation starts to kill us. Attack one of our peers and we will quickly form an attack right back. With this in mind you can understand how easy the hype machine can be built up amongst ourselves.

Some companies like to start hype on purpose. For instance, Blinksale had arguably the best hype campaign in the community this year. It was tough going a day without seeing it linked from some designer’s site singing praise for the invoicing web application even before it launched! The problem with all of this hype? Many will argue that they didn’t deliver due to a large amount of downtime. In this sense, the hype worked against them (I don’t use Blinksale so I cannot speak on the quality of the application or its uptime).

Many of us seem to frown on the hype machine, but I enjoy it. I love studying it. If you have a company I am sure the people who run it are interested in it as well. That’s why you see many companies today wrongly jump on the blog bandwagon because they believe they can create buzz with a blog. Creating buzz is not hard if you already have an audience. However, many times you will find that companies work more on creating buzz than creating a quality product.

And that’s where the hype starts to get annoying.

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Originally posted on August 22, 2005 @ 10:22 am

Boost Your Revenue With A Targeted Online Approach

If your business is having a little trouble hitting the mark, your web presence may need a little work. Understanding how to reach your target audience online is a pivotal element of a successful marketing campaign.   [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 15, 2020 @ 9:40 am