Ejoh

Running a big community web site with lots of users is like skating on very thin slippery ice. I have very little experience from doing that but I recently saw a big Swedish site perish under its furious users. The site, Bilddagboken, is a image uploading tool which allows you to view your images to other people much like Flickr and also comes with a diary for every user. Yesterday they decided to publish a set of new features along with a new fresh design.

Unfortunately for them the design loaded very slow in the beginning, for various reasons, and the users weren’t happy. Although the new style was far more pleasant to the eye than the old one they decided they didn’t like it. Probably because so much had changed that it was impossible to navigate through the site when you had learned another way to do it.

So, how do you launch a new design and keep your user base pleased?

1. Don’t change too much
   Your users don’t want to have to look for the features on your site on other places than where they expect them to be.
2. Test
   Never launch a design on a community site which has not been tested thoroughly. Your visitors will kill you if things don’t work the way they’re expected to.
3. Keep things simple
   Before doing extreme, futuristic design, you should make sure you have something simple that really works and is well thought through.

I am sure you could have figured out these three simple things on your own but it seems some big sites have not.