Mark Porter

Last week the Sport section of guardian.co.uk migrated to the new platform, and acquired the “new” (18-month-old) look. Just the latest rollout in our redesign and rebuild programme which began with Travel way back in late 2006. A few parts of the network are still in the pipeline, but it’s finally starting to feel like the heavy lifting will soon be over.

As ever, the changes brought a flood of comments from users. Mostly pretty positive. Sport fans seem to have a sense of humour which makes reading their feedback a lot of fun (”Daddy, why are things different?”… “dont like it. change bad”). The majority seem to appreciate the new functionality and feel that they’re getting a richer experience, which is the whole idea; but sadly not everyone agrees. They never do.

I’ve been through this many times before. People form very intimate relationships with newspapers, magazines and websites, and you have to redesign them with an awareness that change can be destabilising. It’s as if we go into our users’ homes in the middle of the night and rearrange all the furniture without consulting them, so it’s not surprising that the immediate reaction is often negative. David Hillman’s Guardian redesign of 1998 got some classic responses. One reader wrote, “Got the comic. Where’s the newspaper?”, and the great Spike Milligan wrote in to accuse the editor of having “one meeting too many”. (Strangely our 2005 print relaunch bucked the trend by being universally well received by readers, if not by newspaper editors and graphic designers).

In the digital era, the ease of clicking the “post your comment” button means that those hostile reactions get to us quicker and in greater numbers than ever before. Some raise specific issues which we need to address. But the guardian.co.uk redesign has also brought a stream of comments from people who just wonder why anything had to change, and who miss the simplicity of the old site. There’s a straighforward answer: that simplicity reflected the fact that the old site couldn’t do very much other than text articles and trailblocks. The new platform brings enormous improvements in the handling of audio and video, and enables a much richer set of relationships to grow between discrete pieces of content. There’s a price to pay for this in the complexity of the pages (which can impact negatively on the experience), and a possible loss of individuality (all content-rich news-driven websites are trying to do roughly the same things with a restricted set of tools; the inevitable result is a convergence in the design, as with printed newspapers before the era of desktop make-up). On balance, we’re confident that the user gains more from the changes than they lose, though it doesn’t stop the design team thinking how we can improve things.

Instant user responses are both a blessing and a curse. Ultimately the user is our client, and if the client is not satisfied with the design then we need to know about it. The immediate feedback we get from digital media clearly enriches the design process. But it can get pretty depressing wading through oceans of bile and vitriol. And if the job is done well, with genuine sensitivity to the user’s needs, the designer has to assume that most of the bad feelings will fade with time. As one commenter on Sport put it…
“Where is everything?/oh there it is/getting used to it now/how did it look before again?”