Designing an Effective MySpace Open Social Application
Designing applications for the Facebook and MySpace APIs have been all the rage (and the newest way to spam). Most of them aren’t very good because the designers don’t understand the nature of designing a limited user interface application, and frankly, the execution of most of the ideas has been poor or non-existent.
I’ve worked directly with the MySpace API team and am currently designing the user experience of several MySpace Applications (probably more of them on the current list than anyone else).
Here are some guidelines for designing MySpace applications.
It’s all about the surface and how you use it
There are three surfaces that are accessible for designing MySpace applications, and all three of them should be used differently:
- The User Home Page — The first page the user sees when they sign in.
- The User Profile — The pages that displays a user’s information to other users.
- The Canvas Page — A blank page that can be used by sending users from either the User Home Page or User Profile.
The User Home Page should be used to see updates that the user wants to see about the application. For example, an application could she how many are interested in you, or you can vote on other people through the User Home Page functionality of uLike. The idea is to show updates for the application that apply only to you.
The User Profile should be used to show people items you want to show them i.e. if they are interested in you. It could also be photos you want to share, or other information like quizzes they should take.
Remember, it’s a small space
When designing for the User Home Page and User Profile, think of it as designing for a mobile application, because that’s how much screen real estate that you have. The spaces are amazingly small — 270 pixels tall by 430 pixels wide for the User Profile, but the space can go taller — so trying to pack a lot of copy or functionality into a small space is a bad idea. It’s about an economy of words and photos, and even the photos should be as large as possible to make it all fit. Examples of this could be a photo browser Mac OS X style that has a limited footprint, or single function applications, like voting.
The Canvas surface have much more space, but even then, it’s trapped at 800 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, generally, so space is at a premium.
You necessarily can’t access all of the information
One of the issues we had in designing some of the early applications was the amount of information we could access for each user, because users can limit the amount of information that is used by the application. The best case scenario? Plan for an application design that allows for:
- All user information to be seen
- Only the user id and non of the user profile information to be seen
- Anonymous users
If and when you do Quality Assurance (you are doing testing, aren’t you?), plan for unit tests that consider all three states.
Most of all, make it engaging
What I mean by engaging is it shouldn’t blink red, or just show photos of your weird friends — it should be an application of real value that has a viral aspect of it. No one should be designing the next Hot or Not, and the irony of the MySpace platform is that because the applications actually have screen real estate on the User Profile and User Home Page, that already puts the platform step ahead of Facebook.
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