Fwd: UIEtips: The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch

This article certainly provided me with 'food for thought.'

Sarah

>From: Jared M. Spool <jared.m.spool@uie.com>
>Subject: UIEtips: The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch
>
>
>--> Letter from the Editor
>
>Greetings,
>
>Every week we get calls from people who are looking for help with a
>redesign of their site. They are rethinking the entire design and
>hoping their new concept will get them what they want.
>
>The sad thing is they are very likely to fail. We've been studying web
>site design for more than ten years and, if we've learned anything,
>it's that redesigns rarely improve a site. At best, it just rearranges
>the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users
>without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is
>trying to attract.
>
>For several years, we've recommended our clients take a strategy of
>incremental change. Pick one small piece of the site to change and
>focus on that. You'll have less stakeholders to cater to, fewer
>personas to integrate, and you'll keep the risk down to something
>manageable, all the while you'll be learning about your users and what
>they need.
>
>...

>Enjoy today's article,
>
>Jared M. Spool
>Editor, UIEtips
>
>
>....

>--> Feature Article: The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch
>By Jared M. Spool
>
>"It seems like a such a huge undertaking," the Senior VP of Marketing
>told me. "Frankly, we're terrified we're going to make things worse
>than they already are."
>
>The VP was sitting at the conference table with her senior staff.
>They'd been discussing the state of the web site and their desire to
>completely redesign it.
>
>I couldn't really fault them. One person had created the site in
>1997, basically to showcase some of their most basic features. Over
>the years, as the business needed a new feature or added a new
>service, they appended functionality and content to the site without
>fanfare or forethought.
>
>Initially, they didn't consider the web important to their business.
>Like many small organizations, the Web's strategic advantage to their
>business just crept up on them -- they didn't plan it, it just grew
>that way. They woke up one day and realized that their web site had
>become critically important. Organic design, I call it.
>
>Now, years later, they were faced with a site that seemed to defy
>architecture. Everyone at the table agreed. The look was dated -- big
>fonts, too many graphics, and frames (you read that right -- frames!).
>They all knew something had to be done.
>
>That's why we were talking about a re-launch. More than anything, they
>wanted a major overhaul. A complete rethinking of the site. A total
>gutting -- they will spare nothing -- they will redesign everything.
>
>It sounded good on the surface, but the dimensions of it were
>overwhelming. There was so much content -- approximately 3,000
>pages at last count. A complete new architecture had to come from
>scratch. They had to drive the design from the user's goals and tasks
>-- a new mindset for people who normally think in terms of business
>units and organizational departments.
>
>For example, they knew the current left navigation bar had to go. It
>was 24 independently scrolling links with ambiguous single-word terms,
>no specific order, and rarely useful to the user. They knew they
>wanted to replace it with links specific to the user's tasks. (For
>example, while exploring housing mortgages, the links would all be
>specific to researching, explaining, and applying for loans.)
>
>The team to do this was limited with five full-time folks. None of
>them had ever undertaken anything of this scale. Even something as
>simple as a card-sorting exercise seemed daunting, because of their
>lack of experience.
>
>It would have been easier to consider this if everyone hated the
>site. But, that was the problem. People loved the site! Customers
>regularly wrote emails saying that the site was great. Many generally
>considered them the most state-of-the-art of all their competitors.
>The industry trade press regularly hailed the site as an 'example of
>the future'.
>
>Everybody thought it was great. Except for the designers, who knew,
>deep down, that they could do *so much better.*
>
>The VP leaned forward and asked me, "How do we orchestrate a
>re-launch on a site this big without upsetting our customers? Any
>change is going to be *so* dramatic that people are definitely going
>to complain. How do we do this?"
>
>I leaned back in my chair, paused for a second, then dropped the
>bomb. "You don't, " I responded. "A re-launch is a very bad idea. I
>highly recommend against it."
>
>The group around the table manifested what looked to me like a single
>confused look. It was as if they had a corporate standard for
>displaying puzzlement.
>
>The Creative Director, who'd been very quiet up until now, broke the
>silence. "Are you saying that we keep the site as it is? Leave things
>the way they are?"
>
>"No," I replied, "I'm just saying that you don't embark on a total
>redesign. There's another way to build a new architecture with a whole
>new site without the risks of a re-launch."
>
>I explained that re-launches are a thing of the past. There was a time
>when sites launched in cycles, living from one major redesign to the
>next. Each new redesign would bring a whole new look, a whole new user
>experience.
>
>Companies would often hire new outside firms to create and execute
>these new designs, abandoning the firm that made the previous design.
>The new firms would try to top the existing design with something
>dramatically different and attention-grabbing. After all, if you can't
>notice any change, why did it cost so much?
>
> > Subtle Evolution: The Success of Continuous Design Improvements
>
>However, the best sites have replaced this process of revolution with
>a new process of subtle evolution. Entire redesigns have quietly faded
>away with continuous improvements taking their place.
>
>The big survivors of the dot-com crash -- Amazon, eBay, Dell,
>Google, Yahoo, and CNN -- have each foregone the big redesign in lieu
>of continual changes on the site. The changes are so fluid that users
>hardly notice.
>
>Here are some of the stories of subtle change that I told the team:
>
> > Revamping Amazon.com's Product Lines
>
>Many long-term Amazon customers tell us they believe the site is
>almost exactly the same as it was years ago, when they first started
>using it. Yet, there are many new features added every month.
>Currently, Amazon is revamping their product lines to support the
>addition of apparel sales -- something which needs an entire new
>interface compared to their previous lines. They have slowly phased in
>many of the necessary changes over several months.
>
> > The Subtle Morphing of Yahoo.com
>
>Yahoo recently redesigned their home page, but the rest of the site
>didn't seem to change -- at least, not for a while. Then, a few weeks
>later, they updated their Yahoo Mail service with a new look. A few
>weeks later, Yahoo Movies had several new page designs. Over time, the
>entire site is morphing, but it's hard to say when it started and when
>it will end.
>
> > eBay.com: Satisfying their Users with Gradual Evolution
>
>At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like
>dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer
>liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they
>just changed it to a white background. Instantly, they started
>receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people
>complained, that they felt forced to change it back.
>
>Not content with the initial defeat, the team tried a different
>strategy. Over the period of several months, they modified the
>background color one shade of yellow at a time, until, finally, all
>the yellow was gone, leaving only white. Predictably, hardly a single
>user noticed this time.
>
>More recently, eBay recently underwent a redesign of the forms that
>people use to post items for sale. These pages are critical to the
>success of the site, used more than 1,000,000 times every week.
>Knowing that their users are sensitive to sudden, dramatic changes,
>the team came up with a novel approach to phasing in the forms.
>
>After verifying the changes through usability testing, the team made
>working versions of the new pages available for previewing with a link
>on the existing seller's page. After looking at the preview, users had
>the option of making the new forms their default. By tracking how many
>users converted to using the new forms, the team could measure it's
>acceptance.
>
> > Task Success is Key
>
>Sites much smaller than Yahoo and Amazon can take advantage of an
>evolutionary process. Recent research on how users perceive the design
>of the site helps us know what we can change and what we can't.
>
>Our findings show that consistency in the design plays second fiddle
>to completing the task. When users are complaining about the
>consistency of a site, we've found that it is often because they are
>having trouble completing their tasks. On sites where users easily
>complete their tasks, the users seem to pay little attention to
>glaring inconsistencies, often telling us in their ratings that the
>site was indeed very consistent.
>
>With this knowledge, I recommended to the Marketing VP and her design
>team that they focus on a small portion of the site, such as the
>presentation of the mortgage interest rates. They needed to thoroughly
>research the different goals users had for this information.
>
>Then they could try redesigns in usability testing, experimenting with
>different page designs. Once they have a design that is doing well in
>the lab, I suggested they put on the site, carefully monitoring it's
>acceptance (maybe even using the same technique as eBay did with their
>seller's forms).
>
>There are huge advantages to this approach. Instead of investing in a
>large scale redesign, the team can get their feet wet a little at a
>time. For a team such as this one, that has little experience with
>user-centered techniques, the focused approach allows them to develop
>their skills in small steps.
>
>It also has the advantage of allowing the team to garner a lot of
>quick feedback on smaller impact portions of the site. If, somehow,
>the team launches a few pages that users are unhappy with, it's easy
>to quickly backtrack to the old version and regroup. It's much more
>difficult to bring back an entire site to a previous design.
>
>As the team progresses from one section of the site to the other,
>they'll quickly gather tremendous insight into how users are
>approaching the site, reacting to the design changes, and
>accomplishing their goals.
>
>The meeting came to a close, with the team still absorbing the advice
>I had given them. While there were many details still to resolve, the
>VP and her group were excited about their new options. "It's going to
>take a little getting used to," she said, "but I think we should
>consider the idea of a major relaunch completely dead."
>
>
> + + +
>
>Jared's article is also available on our web site at:
>http://tinyurl.com/rk4nj
>
>Is your organization thinking about a major re-launch? Have you come
>up with a strategy that reduces the risk? We'd like to hear from you.
>Join the discussion on UIE's Brain Sparks blog at
>http://tinyurl.com/b86xu
>
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Received on Tue Aug 8 11:14:01 2006