Bit.ly Redesign Upsets Users: What's Wrong With It? | Hacker News Reader

Bit.ly Redesign Upsets Users: What's Wrong With It?

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31 pointsforrestkoba23 comments

This article is saying the equivalent of, "the primary thing people use Starbucks for is to go to the bathroom. So we tested how hard it is for random people off the street to find the bathroom. Our conclusion is that Starbucks should put the bathroom next to the front door with large signs pointing to it as people walk in."

It seems Bitly doesn't want to be just a link-shortening service anymore. They're pivoting and want to draw you into the new service a little. At the risk of alienating bathroom-seekers, Bitly hopes you'll buy a cup of coffee while you're looking around. Which seems reasonable.

But Starbucks did not start out as a bathroom provider before transitioning into making coffee. If you were a company that provided restrooms open to the public, it would be crazy for you to try to then "pivot" that into a profitable business by making the bathrooms harder to find and trying to sell customers coffee while they danced in place, straining not to pee on your floor as they looked desperately around the shop for your facilities.

pud's Starbucks analogy is still apt though. Bitly is making a conscious change to their business model, and they have to insert a speed bump in the link-shortening process to start making money. There's no way they can continue providing seamless 1-click link-shortening for free.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, if you forgive the cliche.

>There's no such thing as a free lunch, if you forgive the cliche.

Yes, but that doesn't turn everything non-free into a lunch. Try to force your change to happen too quickly, and you're simply going to watch your customers boil away to nothing. In the end, your customer base will be little more than the kind of people that make cybersquatters money because they think that the best way to search for bullets is to type "bullet.com" into the URL bar.

Yesterday, I walked into the office of the CFO at work. He doesn't swear a lot, but there was an amazing stream of profanity coming out of that office. Turns out he was trying to shorten a link with bit.ly and was discovering the redesign for the first time.

The funny thing is I went back to my desk and gave bit.ly a try, and got a fairly clean, uncluttered page that was easy to use--nothing at all like that page the CFO got.

The difference? I don't have a bit.ly account. He does, and was signed in.

As an aside, I'm trying to read this on my iPad and it's absolutely infuriating when websites arbitrarily prevent me from zooming in on text. I'm the one who gets to decide what a good size for text is.

I tweeted a comment along these lines about Flickr's mobile view just last night. Rather than user-friendly, it's user-hostile design.

Forwarded to a pal at Flickr.

My sense is that the design is the product of well-entrenched people and/or policies.

He sent back a smiley face made from punctuation marks. Guess they're working on it.

Or they know it sucks and, "eh, whaddya gonna do?"

It is pretty clear that bit.ly decided their core use case isn't interesting to them as a business and decided to change the core use case from shortening links and displaying metrics to collecting and sharing links. Businesses that need these kinds of metrics should probably be using non-free, more sophisticated services like awe.sm anyway.

This is going to sound strange, but I miss the cool (big) pufferfish in their normal page: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pufferfish360...

That image told me that real people were behind the site, and strangely won my loyalty in a sea of identical clones. The new site removes that and feels pretty but boring and forgettable. Even their twitter icon gives me the "generic social media company feel": https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2260560652/twit....

This is a phenomenon I've seen with a lot of sites as they get big and overhaul their site with a "real" designer who wants things "to be cleaner". Things usually come out more bland...

Bitly has received a total of $13.5 million in funding till date. It's high time they tried to experiment with this huge amount of money to diversify their business and tweak their business model.

What's their business model right now? I see them in a very tough situation: the people who want to shorten links are not their customers - they're the product (the data). The companies that need analytics are their customers, so that's why they're making these changes. Yet if you push away your users, you got no product.

I guess this is what happens when your users = your product.

I sporadically use bit.ly (once a month) to generate a shortlink for email lists to track conversion, geolocation, stats, etc on a nice dashboard.

I tried it yesterday, and I was smashing my head against the wall in frustration. First, what was once a single click is now at least 4, including 3 page navigations. Second, I have no freaking clue how to customize the shortlink, even after spending another 2 or 3 minutes on the site before giving up and deciding not waste any more time.

Bitly's redesign just plain sucks.

I actually really like the new redesign, it looks like they've decided to occupy the niche that used to be del.icio.us before Yahoo! digested it and shat out delicious.com

It does seem like they could have paid more attention to transitioning existing users. But AFAICT they aren't selling products to regular users, they're aiming more at volume buyers and analytics to pay the bills.

My biggest problem with the new site is how hard it is to customize the short link. I did it once after spending like 5 minutes trying to figure it out and to be honest I don't even remember how I did it so next time I'm sure it'll be almost as hard.

Maybe they've changed it, but if you go to bit.ly they do indeed have a "Just want to shorten a link" box at the bottom:

http://bit.ly

Fast fix, looks like all is well.

I just used bit.ly yesterday and was extremely confused by the interface. I understand they are looking to do additional things, but I couldn't even understand how to do a simple task of looking at my past history.

I didn't find how to customize short links in either the new design website or the new chrome extension. Very frustrating

There is a little pencil icon next to the shortened link that lets you edit it.

Every redesign upsets users, where "users" is defined as one or more people with a blog. People do not like change.

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