I am in the business of redesigning websites. A good portion of the work we do at 3W Studios is redesigning existing sites. There is always a good reason – it’s too old, there is a new president, the logo changed, there is a new product, it’s March – whatever the reason, we like to think we always come up with something that is better than the previous version.
However, there is that fact of nature, that phenomenon, that designer’s nightmare – the human resistance to change. We all like what we know, and we all have some resistance to change – more so if the thing that changed was something we really liked. In the case of most of our redesigns, the leap is big enough, the gain in functionality or service or ease of use is so big, that we get very little negative feedback. Hate-email about why we made it blue is pretty rare. Actually, I don’t recall any such problems.
A few weeks ago, the shoe was on the other foot. The BBC, my source for news (not opinion) and one of my links back to the homeland, redesigned their news website. I don’t like it.
In fact, lots of people don’t like it. The BBC blog entries discussing it got over 4500 posts (unverified), many of them from irate users who were swearing to abandon the site. In the other corner, there was a small group supporting change and ridiculing all the people who “just can’t handle change”. Lost in the slanging match, however, was the plain fact that the new site wasn’t very good.
