I feel that the main problem, perhaps the ONLY problem, is not among the ones you listed: The changes were made involuntarily, without any warning. What you should have done instead was somehting like making the changes, but have them as an alternate mode so that you could chose if you wanted to use the new or old design at first. Then, once you had sorted out almost of the issues you could do things like having the new design be the default for new users, changing everyone profile to it but allowing the option to change back, etc. Only once almost everyone is using only the new design should the option of using the old one be removed.
People react badly to being FORCED to change, almost regardless of what the change is, and this was basically a beta version which means it can’t be UNAMBIGUOUSLY good.
There is really nothing mayor wrong with the design, just the way it was introduced to the userbase.
Aw c’mon, there was plenty of warnings, the various thread on improvement suggestions, the screenshots … I don’t think I would have preferred to have even more threads devoted to css bikeshedding.
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.
I feel that the main problem, perhaps the ONLY problem, is not among the ones you listed: The changes were made involuntarily, without any warning. What you should have done instead was somehting like making the changes, but have them as an alternate mode so that you could chose if you wanted to use the new or old design at first. Then, once you had sorted out almost of the issues you could do things like having the new design be the default for new users, changing everyone profile to it but allowing the option to change back, etc. Only once almost everyone is using only the new design should the option of using the old one be removed.
People react badly to being FORCED to change, almost regardless of what the change is, and this was basically a beta version which means it can’t be UNAMBIGUOUSLY good.
There is really nothing mayor wrong with the design, just the way it was introduced to the userbase.
Aw c’mon, there was plenty of warnings, the various thread on improvement suggestions, the screenshots … I don’t think I would have preferred to have even more threads devoted to css bikeshedding.
If there were warnings, I didn’t see them, and I miss few things around here.
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.