Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media » MySpace Mondays

MySpace Mondays: The MySpace Developer Blog

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:00:46 +0000

This isn’t so much a review but more of a pointer where you can get the most up to date information about the MySpace Application Platform. The blog contains a lot of useful information like what’s going to be changed, and what the future holds for the platform, and most importantly, the people writing the blog are not some lackeys, they are the leaders that make the platform happen. Another place to check out is the release notes — the blog refers to them occasionally, but the little details that change from release to release are contained there.

If your attention span is limited the 140 characters, the Developer Team also has a twitter feed for updates on system issues and site performance.Similar Posts:

MySpace Mondays: Los Angeles Angels Network

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:00:44 +0000

I picked the Los Angeles Angels Network because it’s my favorite baseball team, but the authors have created a bunch of applications for all the major sports teams, and each is branded to each team. If I were to create an application that was for sports and the MySpace platform, this is it (even though it’s obviously a port from Facebook).

The sports network applications are very rich experiences that has all the information about the team, trivia questions about the team where you are ranked with other group members, and you can talk smack about other teams. The canvas surface of the application has a summary page that drives traffic into all of the other pages of the application, and it’s very dense with content even if it is a bit overwhelming.

This is an extension of the MySpace platform because it also has commenting, essentially creating not only a group for fans to meet, but also drawing in other content they can find out about the team. It’s a mini-portal, done right.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 4
Usability: 5
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: How To Improve Your MySpace Application

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:00:33 +0000

I’m taking a break from reviewing them this week because I want to offer a few tips that hopefully someone will take note of. Most of the MySpace applications aren’t very good from an usability standpoint, and it’s usually the little things they are missing that separate a good application from a great application. Additionally, the MySpace platform is still a moving target, but the end user doesn’t have to see that.

Don’t be that Johnny Bedroom hack developer that we considered when building the MySpace developer site; think of solutions that would make your application better. This stuff isn’t rocket science — even blondes can offer great tips!

Here are a few tips that might improve the user experience.

Show a loading message when the application is loading

The MySpace platform is sometimes slow, and the end user is subjected to half-loaded pages with arrows in places where there shouldn’t be arrows for navigation. Since it’s all JavaScript, and at the beginning a loading image could be show, why not do that? All it takes is showing a layer at the beginning of the JavaScript call, and hiding that loading layer as soon as the page is built.

We’re talking three lines of code.

Please, don’t you want a better experience for your users for three lines of code?

Test your application

As I have posted previously, nothing frustrates an end user more than an application that doesn’t appear to work, because they think it’s their fault. Test, test, and test again. This is especially true with some of the Flash applications on the platform — most of them have some kind of issue that makes them break.

Consider all the edge cases and build error messages around them

What happens to your application when the connection to the platform breaks, or it returns a malformed result? There should be some code in the JavaScript that considers all error messages that could happen when interacting with the platform, and provide a solution for each one. It doesn’t have to be elegant, but it should hide that there was some kind of issue with the system.

Make the application look good

Most of the applications I’ve seen so far look like the Omaha, Nebraska Greyhound Terminal (don’t ask, I’ve never been there). Hire a designer to work with you, and make the application look better — that will encourage usage, and give legitimacy to the application as a quality product.

There are other ways to encourage the viral spread of the application without sending out bulletins

The MySpace terms of use for the application platform doesn’t allow spamming the users, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reward people for encouraging installs; some of the applications have come up with some unique ideas, like giving out bonuses if over a certain amount of friends have the application installed, or another bonus when someone installs the application from your profile through a link. There are many, many ways to make promoting your application fun without breaking the rules.Similar Posts:

MySpace Mondays: My Local Events

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:00:58 +0000

Want to keep track of your favorite bands? My Local Events by Eventful goes through your friends’ list and finds events from them to show when they are coming to your town. You can also request that your favorite bands play in your neighborhood. They also have a very efficient search engine to find bands to you can add to your top bands list.

The issue with applications like this is that they require a critical mass of listings to make them useful. The application itself is well thought out and useful, but there aren’t enough listings to drive significant traffic yet. Plus the application is a bit thin in the functionality space (it would be nice if there were more links to photos and music) to make it a more complete application.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 3
Usability: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: Stick Family

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:00:23 +0000

For the artist in you, you can create your own Stick Figure Family. It’s sort of like of a family tree that you can have. It’s cute, it’s fairly easy to use but I’m going to knock off a point because buttons should be used instead of hyperlinks in some places, but that’s not the only thing going on.

Most importantly, they have figured out like some of the other applications that they should be cross promoting across the multiple social networking sites. There are four other sites like FaceBook they are promoting this application on. The reason it’s called Open Social is that it’s an open platform. Sure, there’s some customization that goes on, but not that much, so we should be seeing more of this.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 2
Usability: 2
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 3

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MySpace Mondays: Mini Golf

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:00:06 +0000

Mini Golf is exactly as it sounds — a miniature golf course played through a Adobe Flash application right there on MySpace. It sounds like a nifty idea, but there have been a fare number of Flash applications that have done the same thing, some of them better with a high quality, and this one asks you to buy the gold version the page.

It’s fun, but tough. The one usability issue I have is there is no way to preview the complete hole (move the cursor around) to see where you have to shoot.

The other issue: it’s a social networking site. You would think a ranking system would be in place, versus your friends and everyone on MySpace. But alas, it’s a one player game, essentially.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 2
Usability: 2
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 4

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MySpace Mondays: Virtual Cat

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:00:39 +0000

Virtual Cat is a take off on Pokey. It really could be titled “when good apps go bad”. It has a slight cute factor, but doesn’t have as many hot spots or actions seemingly that Pokey has, and it’s kind of a one trick cat. It would be more fun if there were some playtoys or something to give to the cat like Pokey has.

The advantage, though, is that it’s not nearly the download that Pokey was, so it shows up quicker. And this developer added advertising, so at least someone’s getting it.

On the other hand, it acts just like real cats — it doesn’t do much!

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability: 3
Fun Factor: 4
Stability:5
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: Free Stuff Times

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:00:17 +0000

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Another application trying to turn your MySpace page into one-stop shopping spot, Free Stuff Times draws from items that are listed on it’s blog about free stuff on the internet. It seems like of a great way to shill content from advertisers, and some of the items smack of Amway promotions.

It’s not a particularly good implementation of a great idea, but it shows how you can use MySpace as a decent advertising platform.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 4
Usability: 2
Fun Factor: 1
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: Flash Photo Viewer

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:00:48 +0000

The real goal of MySpace opening up their site to external applications is so developers will extend the profiles and give the end users more functionality to view their MySpace content. Flash Photo Viewer is a good example at an attempt to extend the functionality.

Flash Photo Viewer is exactly what it’s titled: an application built in Flash that loads on your photos on your home page, profile and canvas so you can view all your photos in a scrollable list, and see a larger version of a photo in the primary window. Click on that photo, and a new window displays the full version of the photo. While you view the profile or home page, the viewer goes into slideshow mode.

The application isn’t very complex, but it doesn’t have to be — it does exactly what it advertises.

The application design has a few issues though. It looks the the developer didn’t build separate Flash applications for the User Home Page, User Profile and Canvas, so the size of the slideshow controls is painfully small on the profile and home page. Additionally, the interface is clunky, not polished.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 4
Usability: 3
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 4
Monetization Opportunities: 3

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MySpace Mondays: Trip Advisor

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:45 +0000

Leavin’ on a jet plane? I was cruising through the applications, and found one from Trip Advisor called Local Picks (note to Trip Advisor: how about a better, more interesting name, yo). Trip Advisor is the tame version of Yelp!, and orientated around travel. Need to find a hotel? It’s there. Need to find a restaurants with a lot of reviews? It’s probably there.

That’s the cool thing about this application — it’s using already available information from it’s review database to present users with a great guide just like it’s website. I even found my favorite restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia (of course, it got a great review)!

I’m sure this is a direct ripoff from their Facebook application, but it would interesting if they tailored their application more towards the MySpace crowd; this application is a bit too adultish, and it would probably be well-served by adding a few categories, like most bizarre restaurant or most hip restaurant. It’s not very fun right now.

If they ever can get users to adopt the application, there are a ton of monetization opportunities, considering their advertising base — it currently has less than 1,000 installs. It’s probably not hip enough for MySpace, and Yelp! might do better.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 4
Usability: 5
Fun Factor: 3
Stability: 2
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: Causes

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:00:57 +0000

Want to save the world? You can do it one friend at a time with an application called Causes. You can join an already established cause, or start your own. Helping get friends to join the cause raises its ranking within all of the causes, and the ranking system that shows not only what you have done, but what others have done within the last day, week, month and all time.

More importantly, you can donate to a cause, and the application shows how much money has been donated to particular causes, and add content via videos and comments about that cause. You can also edit the content that is contained within your user profile, and encourage your friends to donate. Because of this, some of the causes have already raised thousands of dollars.

The usability of this application is the best I have seen so far out of the applications — the amount of detail in the application for this outstrips applications by some of the professional companies that are part of the MySpace platform. The only knock against it was the first time I visited the application, it was broken from stability issues.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 4
Usability: 5
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 3
Monetization Opportunities: 4

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MySpace Mondays: Simply Hired

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:00:59 +0000

What if you are a really big company, have a good idea, and the implementation is so poor that no one wants to use it? This is what you get when you have an application like Simply Hired. The concept is simple — based on the zip code in your profile, it shows you five jobs that are matches.

The problem is that you really can’t do much with it — it lists only five jobs, there’s no search functionality, and there’s no indication of how to change the zip code or even what the search is based off of. It does launch to a search region, but it would be even better that someone could actually start a search within an application. And there is so little branding with this application you don’t know what it’s for after installing it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability: 2
Fun Factor: 1
Stability: 4
Monetization Opportunities: 5

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MySpace Mondays: Where I’ve Been

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:00:15 +0000

Where I’ve Been is a simple application that allows the user to enter all the places they’ve been — Beirut, Stanton, Paris — into the application and compare places with friends. When you search for cities that you’ve been, it searches for the city and returns surrounding cities to all. You can compare where you have been with friends, see statistics across the network, and there are a lot of opportunities for cross content display.

The interface is slick, very well thought out and an excellent use of Flash. The search algorithms need some work (I always love to enter St. Louis and see what the result is), but some of the surrounding cities as a result are fun. The usability of the map is off the charts; it was easy to find cities, and the response times were great.

Great app for advertising, but they really need to add targeting for the advertising (i.e. Miami advertisements for people that have been to Florida, etc.).

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Stability: 5
Monetization Opportunities: 4

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MySpace Mondays: MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:00:57 +0000

MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes is another one of those rating applications, this along the lines of selecting one of your photos and then matching it to a celebrity in their database. After you have selected the celebrity, other users get to vote on a scale of one to ten how close you resemble that celebrity.

It’s a basic application: just another form of Hot or Not, substituting a look alike to how hot you are. The only real option is to keep viewing people. The application also has a few nifty features, like morphing your photo into a celeb and then posting it to your profile.

Their. database is pretty large — it seems to contain over 1,000 images to select from — and the face recognization technology they have built into Flash is pretty good, and the usability of the application is also very well done because it has all the little details that many of the MySpace applications are missing, like hover over effects and indication of state. A nice feature would be selecting from a list of a friends and doing a separated by birth joke.

If they actually built advertising into this, there could be some advertising opportunities, and this application does link to a paid service, creating your online family tree so there has been some thought put into this.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability:5
Fun Factor: 3
Stability: 4
Monetization Opportunities: 3

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MySpace Mondays: Pokey Review

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:00:11 +0000

I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.

Not all applications are about usefulness: Pokey is this great little animation of your own little pet on your home page. The dog fetches frisbies, digs up bones, needs to eat. There’s a definate fun factor here, and the animation is one of the best I have seen for a while.

Don’t pay enough attention, the dog barks. Go away for a long time, the dog sleeps. Feed the dog, and a bag of dog food appears (I hope they are charging Science Diet for showing the bag and logo). It’s cute, but I don’t think it has a ton of lasting power.

It’s easy and fun to use, but there are no viral functions to the application — it just seems people just add the application through the application gallery, and you would think they could use the dog to send messages.

There are no monetization applications for this now. We’ll see where it goes.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Stability: 2
Monetization Opportunities: 1

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MySpace Mondays: Truth Box Review

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:00:46 +0000

Truth Box — this is a “me too” application, because it’s easy to build, and there’s quite a few other applications just like it.

The whole concept is that people can comment on your profile anonymously, and you can review the comments without making the public right away. It’s an application that appeals mostly to the teen set, I guess, because you can tell someone of what you think of them without having to reveal who you are.

While this particular application isn’t particularly attractive, it’s fairly easy to use, and most of the functionality is easy to find. The viral functionality works the best (of course), and one of the interesting issues with it is somehow people were able to submit comments about a profile I had before I had the application, so I could view them from the storage area.

The is purely a page views application, so the targeting for advertising is almost nil.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 2
Usability: 4
Fun Factor: 4
Stability: 2
Monetization Opportunities: 1

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MySpace Mondays: Own Your Friends Review

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:00:17 +0000

The first is Own Your Friends. This is a fun application, it now has close to 900,000 installs. Staggering.

Own Your Friends is an application where you can buy your friends, almost as trading cards. It works almost as a market model where every time a friend is bought, the price goes up. Of course you also get rewarded for visiting the site every day, sending bulletins, inviting other friends, and giving your friends to others as gifts (the real secret of the application to making money).

However, if you are really into watching your friends’ number go up on MySpace, this is the application for you, because you’ll come back just to see how much you are worth a few times a day (I know I’m doing it on a couple of accounts just to try it out).

Like most of the new applications, the usability has a lot to be left desired — it’s not designed to really take advantage of a limited space, and on the canvas, to fully see everything I had to turn my monitor vertical, and even then, I had a scroll bar. I would offer to help redesign this application just to make it better because there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this one.

From a monetization standpoint, this application is all about page views, because there is really no targeting that can be done, so the application developer is going to have to figure that out. Also, the stability of the application lends itself to the suggestion that this is a homegrown application by someone that has never seen the traffic MySpace can generate.

There are some ideas that could come out of it.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

Usefulness: 1
Usability: 2
Fun Factor: 5
Stability: 2
Monetization Opportunities: 2

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MySpace Mondays: Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:00:19 +0000

I know this has been around for a while, but I still think it’s relevant — Mike Davidson does a great job of showing how to design an effective MySpace page. He also gives you a sample page to start from so you can customized based off of that.Similar Posts:

Designing an Effective MySpace Open Social Application

Patrick Neeman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:55 +0000

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.Similar Posts: