Redesign Bravery And The Nature Of Feedback

When Facebook recently revamped its website, widening and dividing its pages into tabs, its staff probably foresaw the initial outcry. Redesign rage is pretty common, and most sites receive some negative feedback when they change things on a large scale. SEOmoz has received an uncommonly high number of positive comments every time we've redesigned, but we still have to filter the feedback and figure out what works and what doesn't.Our UI designer Timmy let me use the new Q&A section of the site for a few days before asking me, in a more specific fashion, if it worked all right. Q&A, in fact, has changed far less than some other parts of the site, although I appreciated both the question and the fact that he let me get used to it before asking for feedback. Because redesigns aren't just about what the site looks like: they're about how it functions.In the secondary navigation at the top of the screen (the blue bar), you'll see a drop-down menu labeled "SEO Resources." From that list, people can access PRO Guides, video tutorials and PRO tips, the Social Directory and Link Directory. Some of these things were notoriously difficult to find on our old site: I could never remember how to best access some of them and I always typed in the URL instead. How's that for usability?Changes such as this aren't done for the sake of aesthetics and suggest that one should not judge a redesigned website too quickly. It's really easy to lay eyes on something different and immediately decide that it's unpleasant. In fact, being unsure about something seems to be a basic human response to visual change.
reprint from:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/redesign-bravery