06/19/2008 05:53:14 AM 
Since the brand is the web experience everything that happens there is critical to how people use and perceive the brand. It appears that Adaptive Path did tons of work to make MySpace a cleaner, less cluttered experience.
Lots of detailed and complex research and testing with users to make the improvements. However, it's way more than a cosmetic, because such changes impact the organizational culture and how the company functions.
Monkey Bites has a very interesting post discussing the process.
"Ryan Freitas, the project lead for the redesign, spoke with us over the phone Tuesday. Freitas says his team’s focus was to change the old way of thinking that was gunking up the MySpace experience, namely that you don’t need to put everything in front of the user all the time."
"Most importantly, Freitas says, these changes were more about the design process than the usability enhancements............
“You can see the way a team operates internally based on the way their product works when it comes out,” he says. “MySpace is pretty democratic, but they hadn’t ever streamlined their collaboration between tech, content and presentation.”
He says the Adaptive Path team pushed MySpace to become more inclusive as an organization. They brought all of the various stakeholders, from ad sales and technology to visual design, into the process of designing the user experience.
“It’s not just a UI change, it’s an organizational change,” he says. “It was a true ‘teach a man to fish’ situation.”
If some agency group isn't thinking already about investing in Adaptive Path, they soon will be.This company appears to be at the front-end of a new world of positioning and re-positioning brands through experience.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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