This user study found only 20% of users could successfully upload a new profile picture and only 30% could figure out how to post a status update!
How's "LOZ ... MYSPACE IS TOO HARD TO USE, LOL YGM" for a profile name?
"MySpace is really Hard to use for me....."
"MySpace wants me to delete my account it seems. "
MySpace Employee: "[T]he primary failure of Myspace was usability."
"We need not look much further than the horrible user experience of the average MySpace user to find out why the crown is gone."
"facebook = Everything you want, Easy to use. MySpace = music, Emo's, Hard to use & navigate. [...] Myspace runs way too slow"
"If you’re able to use Myspace with no trouble at all you’ve gotten yourself into some really bad habits. Working around Myspace is really difficult, holes need to be jumped through over and over again."
"MySpace is messy, hard to use and impossible to even find new music with."
"What makes me mad is how can you save the changes you made on the Mypace editors. I tried to publish it but it'll just take me back to my old page."
"I hate the new myspace. it's to much and it's hard to work with... whats myspace if you can't edit it like you use to be able to?"
- Why do MySpace profiles suck so much? Because people in bands are lazy or bad at customising stuff?
No. Anybody with a MySpace profile knows how hard it is to customise it, even with a profile editor. - Do I really need to use MySpace?
No. I recommend using it for the Friends feature - don't even get a music account, just use Blogger along with SoundCloud, PicasaWebAlbums, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and use your MySpace account to link to them. You can embed your music, videos, pictures etc, and then MySpace never gets control of your tracks. - What's wrong with trusting MySpace with my music?
MySpace shuts artists out of their profiles all the time, claiming bullshit copyright violations. One of my MySpace profiles got locked, and now I can't do anything with it - can't update or remove tracks, change my layout or anything... and it's the one with my completely original songs! The one that contains tracks that are so sample-heavy that they're illegal got left alone. Go figure. Anyway, when you use embedded playlists from other sites, even if your MySpace profile gets locked, you can still keep control of your materials. - Isn't it kind of a pain to maintain all these different accounts?
Nope. MySpace is so terribly designed and hard to use that it's less work to maintain your Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter, Flickr/Picasa and YouTube accounts. Plus, with each one, you reach a whole new audience, and when you bring them all together with your Blogger or MySpace account, you get so much power to present media all in one place. - But isn't MySpace changing and improving to become more modern?
Yeah, but because they don't do any user testing, analysis or Information Architecture work, it's just getting worse, not better. - Won't the MySpace people clue in at some point and start doing user testing?
They've had a decade to figure this out. It's not going to happen.
