Myspace and Usability

Anyone who knows me, knows that I crap on about Myspace an awful lot. After six months not using it, I finally deleted my account, and it still plagues me.

The problem is that Myspace doesn’t keep its usability problems to itself. People still publish and link their profiles, and musicians augment, and in some cases replace their web sites with it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to go through a Myspace page to do business or make a transaction, and while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, the problem arises when you contrast the usability of Myspace with anything else on the ‘net.

The social networking site has long been the target of ire and criticism from the web development community. The table-based layout is a complete disaster to work with, and the infamous profile customisation people go to town on originated through a lack of form validation.

The site design itself hasn’t improved much over time. The recent revamp did little more than place lipstick and javascript on top of an already poor foundation, and while usability didn’t suffer, neither did it improve.

Nowadays the colossal network is stuck in a stasis between new and old, yet the usability issues remain the same.

• Profile pages are a phenomenal mess of tag soup and incorrectly placed CSS.
• A trend toward tiny 10pt text in narrow columns without any kind of formatting makes it really difficult to find useful information, while the sporadic table-based layout degrades in a ridiculous manner making it impossible to navigate in an alternative fashion. There’s also been a trend lately to overlay massive Flash interfaces over the top of the actual content.
• RSS feeds for blog entries have been disabled, presumably to promote use of the proprietary on-site “blogs” functionality. There are services available to scrape the data into an RSS feed for your use, but this is poised to break the second the blog page layout is changed.
• Hyperlinks are obfuscated and proxied through a third party link service for “security.” These links also fail with an unhelpful message when Javascript is disabled. Myspace is an absolute black hole for Google Juice.

While I’ve got nothing against Myspace or Fox, I have everything against their continuing trend to introduce irresponsible conventions, and generally break the web. For a site with such a basic purpose, how difficult could an accessible layout be to implement? The answer is “not very,” but I’d be willing to bet the internal bureaucracy after the take-over probably holds a lot of the responsibility for the current mess.