I’ve seen those. They were all posted AGES ago, with no indication of whenthe changes would ahpen, and were also based of erly planing stage mockups and not the actual project.
A proper warning would have been “Hey, we’ve finished the redising and are rolling it out tomorow unless there are lots of objections. it’ll look like this: actual screenshot ”
For what it’s worth, I almost never venture in to the discussion area, and my reaction was immediately “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!”
That said, for anyone who doesn’t touch Discussion, or objects to the “live testing” philosophy, I can see it being an issue. On the other hand, setting up an entire cloned test site, or doing all the changes via CSS, would have made this a more complex project—especially given that they’re not being paid to do this, I consider it pretty reasonable to do “live QA”.
It also has the added advantage of getting feedback from everyone, instead of just the Favored Few of the Bayesian Conspiracy :)
The difference between “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!” and “Ahh, some new changes must have gone live!” is negligible in this case I think. The problem was that you didn’t think before you opened up the site “The new changes are probably up by now” and thus there’s still a surprise involved.
And thanks for finding a name to where our disagreements lie. I object strongly to live testing.
The last warning was less than a month before the changes (and in my memory is “pretty recent”), and had screenshots pretty close to what we have now, though some suggestions given in the comments were taken into account (use thumbs for vote up/down not for agree/disagree). I for one thing matt (and others?) were right to deploy the new design as soon as possible rather than spend more time bikeshedding.
Yes, maybe they could have deployed a beta somewhere public, but that would have taken time that would have been better spent improving the site.
Looks like we simply disagree. A month IS a very long time according to me. And I think not pissing of the users would have been worth the extra time spent.
There were several warnings. Personally I’d gotten rather impatient waiting for the actual change.
I’ve seen those. They were all posted AGES ago, with no indication of whenthe changes would ahpen, and were also based of erly planing stage mockups and not the actual project.
A proper warning would have been “Hey, we’ve finished the redising and are rolling it out tomorow unless there are lots of objections. it’ll look like this: actual screenshot ”
For what it’s worth, I almost never venture in to the discussion area, and my reaction was immediately “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!”
That said, for anyone who doesn’t touch Discussion, or objects to the “live testing” philosophy, I can see it being an issue. On the other hand, setting up an entire cloned test site, or doing all the changes via CSS, would have made this a more complex project—especially given that they’re not being paid to do this, I consider it pretty reasonable to do “live QA”.
It also has the added advantage of getting feedback from everyone, instead of just the Favored Few of the Bayesian Conspiracy :)
The difference between “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!” and “Ahh, some new changes must have gone live!” is negligible in this case I think. The problem was that you didn’t think before you opened up the site “The new changes are probably up by now” and thus there’s still a surprise involved.
And thanks for finding a name to where our disagreements lie. I object strongly to live testing.
You are not alone there. I think that a failure to communicate about that was the biggest issue here, and doing it at all was the second.
For what it’s worth, I too was surprised, but it was a pleasant surprise. “Ah, the changes have finally gone live, awesome!”
The last warning was less than a month before the changes (and in my memory is “pretty recent”), and had screenshots pretty close to what we have now, though some suggestions given in the comments were taken into account (use thumbs for vote up/down not for agree/disagree). I for one thing matt (and others?) were right to deploy the new design as soon as possible rather than spend more time bikeshedding.
Yes, maybe they could have deployed a beta somewhere public, but that would have taken time that would have been better spent improving the site.
Looks like we simply disagree. A month IS a very long time according to me. And I think not pissing of the users would have been worth the extra time spent.