Comment by cemregr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cemregr | Hacker News Reader

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These redesigns are good, I have to say. I'm glad you focused on making them more functional instead of prettier (that can't be said about most other unsolicited redesigns).

But after all the discussion about Dustin's AA or Andrew's Zappos redesigns, I don't know how the fact still didn't catch up, that creating the first mockup isn't that big of a deal, and the real work can't be done not taking into account any requirements or business goals :)

And unfortunately from a user's standpoint, a redesign is one of the worst things that could happen to a site. Because however cramped and difficult a site might be, there are people who use them daily, and changing the structure completely overnight would abandon the most loyal users. That's why it's easy for startups to come up with nice sites in 2010, they haven't had a website since 1995 so they don't have the baggage of previous users.

So as much as a redesign, I'd appreciate not a complete overhaul but sort of a compromise, that would improve usability without forcing old users to relearn everything. A good alternative is having the old and new site co-exist for a while, to get feedback on the new site as well, but not all companies unfortunately have resources for that.

No, the most loyal users won't abandon it. They will scream and curse and complain and beg you to make it the way it was for about four weeks. After that time, everyone will have forgotten what the old version looked like and stop complaining.

Rinse, repeat, for every major redesign.

This hasn't been the case for the recent thesixtyone redesign. Hundreds of dedicated users (users who actually spent money) and artists have left and are more than likely never going back.

I'm not sure if this will pan out to be true and anyways they did the opposite of what this guy is doing. They took a usable site and made it unusable :)

Do you have a source for that?

Unless the redesign is a major step backwards, where you'll lose a lot of users with the redesign.

The website for the card game Magic:the Gathering is an example of that, they absolutely wrecked their webpage and forums, and I know that they lost a lot of forum users and webpage readers because of that (but maybe it's ok for them if they weren't the core audience).

I don't know if they did gain among the younger audience, so maybe the redesign was a success... I'll never know, as I'm not an insider.

Point.

I remember my outrage and all of the groups that formed when Facebook created the concept of the "News feed." Remember when to see the differences in people's profiles you had to individually check them?

> And unfortunately from a user's standpoint, a redesign is one of the worst things that could happen to a site. Because however cramped and difficult a site might be, there are people who use them daily, and changing the structure completely overnight would abandon the most loyal users. That's why it's easy for startups to come up with nice sites in 2010, they haven't had a website since 1995 so they don't have the baggage of previous users.

So we should never redesign and make a website more functional because old users might not use it?

I know you're asking that question to point out what you consider to be obvious, but actually I would say the answer to the question is more "yes" than "no".

A redesign in this case may help get new users, but it's much easier (and more cost-effective) to retain existing customers than to gain new customers. So, if your change upsets existing users on any meaningful scale, then it's probably not a good idea.

I'm not saying to never redesign. I'm saying that you should redesign iteratively and in small steps, so that both existing and new users benefit. You never want to attempt gaining new users at the expense of existing users.

These redesigns seem limited to lifting the main functionality out from a bunch of irrelevant detail.

Users who visit the site regularly would probably appreciate the fact that the page contains only the parts they use and no other stuff.

You'd need to do a lot of analytics on the old design to ensure that all the regularly used features are still easy to find.

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