Feb
07
2008Revisiting "The Danger of Design"
07
2008
When I was at Hill, Holliday I wrote a controversial blog post (still available on their site) called “The Danger of Design - How Not to Build an Online Community“. It was so controversial, I was actually called into the Executive VP’s office and told “You shouldn’t say stuff like this, this is what we’re trying to sell“.
I was just going through my archives and decided to re-read exactly what I wrote, and decide whether I still stand by it today.
Yes, I do. Absolutely.
When I wrote this, MySpace was the king of social networking. My argument was that MySpace’s “amateurish” design encouraged a sense of community. Nowadays, Facebook is king of the hill. Does this invalidate my argument?
Absolutely not, in fact it reinforces it. Facebook succeeds for the same reason MySpace did - and then takes it one step further.
Facebook succeeds because, like MySpace, it does not impose Design (again, that’s “capital-D Design”, as I describe in the original post) on the users. And it one-ups MySpace because it prevents its users from imposing Design on others.
Design (capital D design!) is polarizing. Design forces you to make a decision - does this product’s image represent me, or does it not? If you want to attract a certain demographic, you want your products’ Design to speak to exactly that demographic. That’s Marketing 101.
If you want to appeal to everyone, start undesigning.