New Isn’t Always Better

There is a tendency for all businesses to want to ‘refresh’ their web sites periodically. I get this. Every ad campaign needs periodic updating and let’s face it, for most of you your web site is your single biggest ad campaign. But what’s frustrating me recently is a new wave of ‘updates’ that are actually less user-friendly.

For example, have you taken a recent look at the NetFlix web site? It now has a re-design that is seriously frustrating. Yes, one can argue that at first glance it looks more modern, but when you actually start working with it as a subscriber, it’s terrible.

If you’re a movie fan like me, you use the Queue a lot. And the Queue feature was previously just about perfect. You could see everything at a glance. It was also extremely easy to reorder items, remove them, add to them, etc. Now? It is much tougher to do any of these routine tasks. So clearly, someone made a decision of ‘looks’ over practicality and that disturbs me.

Back in the dark days of the early web, so many sites were chock full of absolutely useless doodads. Flying objects, pop-ups, crazy text going every which way. It was nuts. All that calmed down for several years. Designers went for simplicity, which was, in my opinion a great thing.

But now, I’m seeing a steady creep back in the other direction. Sites are getting more fonts, more animations, more ‘stuff’. My assumption is that this is occurring because most of us now have more bandwidth to use up. But note how many web pages take a long time to load (even with a high speed connection!)

What I still suggest is to KEEP IT SIMPLE! I know many people seem to think that a lot of animations and videos are ‘cool’ but the question still comes down to this, “Is it necessary?” Every item on your web page needs to earn its place. And if something is working well? You have to work hard to convince me that it needs changing. Sure we can freshen up colors and design. And there are very few sites that couldn’t do with some copy editing. But the mechanical things: menus, forms, store workflow? Sometimes, it’s good to leave well enough alone. After all, if you have something that really works well, there’s every chance that you’ll only screw it up by trying to ‘improve’ it!