Found this article, MySpace: Is ‘ghetto’ a design choice?, surfing around the net. It all started with a simple question:

From a design perspective we have to look at it as a failure, but obviously it’s not. Why is that? Why hype ugliness?

And further snowballed to 40+ comments. I have to say this is one of most interesting post + threads I’ve come across in a long time. The whole thread raises a lot of very intriguing questions in a very stream of conscious, conversational way. . .

1. The correlation of success (adoption? revenue?) with usability as well as “production value”
2. Inside peek at a startup from an employee’s view point
3. Disgruntled employee in a startup
4. Employees leaving a previously successful startup to take on the employer
5. Founder as a micro manager (reminicent of Steve Jobs)
6. How startup succeeds despite of bad processes/decision making infrastructure
7. How startup succeeds despite not listening to customers
8. How startup succeeds despite of itself in general
9. Relevance of standards to the end users
10. How challengers can overtake incumbents by taking advantage of situational and tactical mistakes of its competitor
11. Customization and personalization as a key competitive advantage in the web 2.0 world of “personal web”
12. User trust and its correlation with brand and look-and-feel
13. The hidden cost of “change” -> learning curve

Each one of the issues raised could be a post in of itself. . . maybe one day when I run out things to write about I’ll come back to this post.

Personally relevant to me is that as an eBay employee and somewhat responsible for its functional design and look & feel, eBay is held up both as what not to do, as well as what to do. More from Jason Kottke here and Vincent Lombardi here. The truth is that we struggle with these issues all the time but everything we do is of conscious choice. We are fully capable of adhering to any spectrum of design standards but one thing that we try to do is to take “user centric” design to its ultimate literal interpretation . . . ie listen, survey, and talk to our community constantly and always.