It’s Monday morning and you’re getting ready to settle into your week. You are sitting by your desk with your usual breakfast and large (very much needed) coffee. You start your morning routine today as always: ritualistically unwrapping your breakfast while opening Outlook to read your mail, snapping back the tab of your coffee lid to take your first sip, opening your web-browser to Yahoo to take a quick look at …Wait! What the??
Something’s wrong. Suddenly you feel uncomfortable, ungrounded. You feel like you’ve entered and alien world: Yahoo has completely changed its layout! How could they do this? You feel betrayed, lost. Nothing is where you expect it to be! Disgusted, you leave the site and go elsewhere to get your morning news.
It’s unnerving when a site changes – and when a staple like Yahoo changes the effect can be users leaving in droves to get their news and email elsewhere.
This is the scenario that Yahoo is trying to avoid by introducing changes to their homepage ever so slowly over the course of the next few months as they make their way to a completely different layout. As reported in the New York Times article Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps, Yahoo is trying to avoid losing users by releasing only small changes to a few users at a time.
Change can be disastrous for a company. I have to commend Yahoo: They are painstakingly taking the time to not only release each change to the public slowly, but they are also usability testing each change and revising to make sure that it will be accepted by as many users as possible.
But what about the rest of us? While it may not be as cost effective to test and release every change individually, we can eliminate user-frustration through timely releases accompanied by usability testing. In this way your site can grow and remain fresh without throwing off users. – And grow in a way that the users want.
There are many reasons to upgrade and change a site, but each change should be a type of evolution: slow, methodical, and containing only those enhancements that were the fittest to survive usability testing.
Often times change can bring on such a strong emotional response that no matter what it is (even those great enhancements to usability) will wrongly give users the impression that a site is more difficult to use. These emotions and subsequent brand perception can be easily avoided by acting slowly and with a game plan. Take it to the users and let change evolve over time! Releases should show off new features not a blindingly different site.
