The courage to redesign

Brian Dillard, Monday, November 3, 2008 @ 5:12 pm

People are still griping about the recent redesigns of Facebook and iGoogle, but I think we should cheer on any company brave enough to disregard user feedback and embrace change.

Lots of big-name, highly successful sites eventually reach a state of paralysis in which they're too scared of alienating their customers to examine their interaction design and information architecture from a fresh perspective.

The cautionary tale of Amazon.com

Look at Amazon: The online retailer adopted DHTML navigation just last year - at least 5 years after most other big sites - because its tab interface had grown so comically large. Nevertheless, huge chunks of the Amazon user experience are still massively broken:

• Once you've started down the checkout process, the site tries to keep you from getting back to your shopping cart to add or remove additional items. If you use your back button to do so, you've got to start the checkout process all over again.
• Wish lists offer perhaps the most confusing, error-prone user interface I've ever had the displeasure to experience.
• Link targets on a wide variety of UI controls are tiny and persnickety enough to elicit involuntary profanity.

Why does Amazon let its design blunders live on in perpetuity? It's simple: Redesigns confuse users, and confused users don't spend money. Your current customers have invested so much effort in learning to work around your site's shortcomings that a new interface stops them in their tracks. Even the most humane and usable UI refresh takes acclimation - and that may cost your site conversions and revenue in the meantime.

The agony and the ecstasy of the redesign

I learned this lesson the hard way during my days at Reflect.com and Orbitz, where A/B testing constantly shocked us by revealing that change, any change, causes key metrics to dip, at least temporarily. Redesign an unusable feature and test the old and new versions with your current customer base on the live site. Chances are, the old version will win in the short term. That's why it takes guts to even consider a top-to-tails redesign. If small changes can have a negative impact, big changes could be deadly.

To me, however, it seems as if the bigger danger lies in allowing your site's information architecture to become ossified. Eventually, new UI paradigms will offer your younger competitors an avenue for feature differentiation. I was at Orbitz when Kayak.com launched, and I was sick with envy that a site could push the user experience of online travel into such new and compelling directions. I knew a company as large as mine could never rock the boat by switching to such an off-the-wall UI.

Sure, budget aggregator Kayak wasn't a direct competitor to an online travel agent like Orbitz. But if somebody had launched a full-service OTA with an interface as fresh as Kayak's, then Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity would have been forced to play catch-up. After all, it was UI differentiation that had originally allowed Orbitz to woo customers from other, more established competitors: Its matrix-based results pages provided a compelling new way to find cheap seats. Eventually, though, other sites copied that feature. Now, all the big OTAs match each other feature for feature.

Beta sites: Hope for the future

That's what's so impressive about today's crop of Web 2.0 upstarts. A young service such as FriendFeed can offer an entirely separate, opt-in beta site and tinker away at it without annoying current users. Then, once the geekier end of the user base has helped work out the kinks, the service can flip the switch and roll out its new features to everyone. That's exactly what Facebook did with its new interface, but at far greater risk than FriendFeed. Facebook may be obscenely overvalued, but it does function as a business. A redesign is far less scary for the relatively unmonetized FriendFeed.

Regardless of whether you're a social networking giant or a microblogging upstart, this kind of usability and design lab has become de rigueur. By acclimating your users to frequent change early on, you can help ensure that future refreshes don't send them packing. Amazon may be in a design coma, but your site shouldn't have to be. Have the courage to redesign early and often.

Related posts:

1. Drupal.org redesign – An Experiment in Design by Community
2. Ajax Intervention: Product tooltips in Amazon’s beta redesign
3. Avoiding the edge in redesign
4. Web 2.0 context menus vs. Web 1.0 link lists: Style over usability?
5. Do you know your SiteKey?

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