MySpace finally cleaned up its act by launching a new, more elegant interface design. Mashable broke the story about a possible MySpace redesign on June 13 after images of the new interface design were leaked to Mark Hopkins.

In the user experience sphere MySpace has often been cited as a paragon of bad design, and many users share this sentiment. It’s a shame that it took them so long to address glaring user experience problems, but as the saying goes, “better late than never.” Below is the newly designed MySpace homepage.

The new homepage employs proven interaction paradigms like tabbed modules to provide a deeper content structure and thus expose more content to users on its main page. To my chagrin they have kept the annoying flash advertisement on top of the page, but they are a for-profit business, so I can understand why it needs to be there.

The new design also features a redesigned header and navigation that seek to bring to the fore access to things users need like their mail, profile, and friends. They also simplified the number of navigation choices, in both the logged-in and logged-out versions, by grouping like items into logical main and sub-navigation schema. One touch that especially appealed to me was addressing new users in a prominent area right next to the branding. Below are the old and new headers and navigation for the logged-out state:

The previous MySpace Header

The redesigned MySpace Header

The logged-in versions of the header and navigation also saw a vast improvement:

From a cursory exploration of the new MySpace design it seems that the new homepage and header were primarily the items that were redesigned. The vast majority of the rest of the site, like the user’s homepage and public profile, seem to have been left untouched.

Although there are still a lot of issues with the site’s user experience, this is a good start, and hopefully they will keep going with it. My main qualm with MySpace? It’s so darn slow!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 10:09 am and is filed under News, Usability, Interaction Design, All User Experience Design.