“MySpace, with its cluttered layout, can suggest an online incarnation of the broken-windows theory—surface disorder begetting actual chaos.”
(from this week’s New Yorker)
Oh Gladwell, you keep popping up everywhere like a state fair whack-a-mole. I’ve never really thought about applying the broken windows theory to web design, but it makes total sense.
Careless design attracts careless behavior which, in the aggregate, leads to a community of sloppy lowlifes.
That would explain why the better-designed facebooks/flickr/vimeo sites have more respectful behavior and a higher class of participants than poorly designed myspace/youtube type sites.
— rickyv
This is bunk. At some point, we were all sloppy lowlifes, aka new Internet users. For many people, I assume, MySpace is their first Internet experiece (“I need to get me a myspace!”). Of course it’s going to be like a daycare center with toddlers running around smearing ice cream on the carpet! The fact is that most users don’t realize the site is poorly designed, in fact I’d say some even think it looks good. It will take time for the MySpace generation to develop etiquette and taste— not everybody has been using the Internet for 10 years!
Bottlomline, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame design. Gawker and NY Observer, for example, both have slick designs, yet their active users are snarky jerks still.
