Tech Joy

New Social Text look: You call this a facelift?

So our class wiki has a new look that is a decided shift away from the old user interface, which had a spare, DIY (Do Internet Yourself) feel. I can’t complain that we weren’t warned that this was coming, but I’ve been blissfully ignoring the “Changes coming to Social Text” notification at login. “Yuck” pretty much sums up my initial reaction to the “facelift.”

There seems to be a lot of space “above the fold,” that is, what you can see in your browser window without scrolling down. Much of this space is taken up by the mutiple dashboards used to navigate Social Text and the class wiki. Surely these could be consolidated—or perhaps the designers should ask themselves if all of these buttons are even necessary. I, for one, have no interest in following the wikis of classes I’m not enrolled in. Another issue for me, which may have more to do with the way our class’s wiki is set up than Social Text’s redesign) is the color of the text, especially where it appears on that icky taupe background. It’s pretty hard on the eyes. What’s wrong with a white background? Very few web pages can successfully use a colored background to display a lot of text.

While these continue to be issues for me, I found that the longer I spent on the wiki, the more I started adjusting to the changes and feeling better about them. How people adapt to new technology and user interfaces is particularly interesting to me because I work marketing for a software company. My understanding of the work that goes into a well-designed user interace probably makes me more willing to embrace software or technology changes then the average user (because I believe that software and technology companies are not evil, but ultimately want to make money, which means not doing anything to deter people from using their products).

For instance, I love the new Yahoo! mail (except when it malfunctions, which has nothing to do with the design, but the technology) and I maintain that its features work better for me than Gmail’s (except for chat—I dig that). I’m also apparently one of the few people who truly loves the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. Sure, there are a few issues, but I honestly feel that the Ribbon, contextual tabs, and floating toolbars help me work faster! I’ve discovered loads of tools that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t feel as stupid using Excel!

I suspect that I had an easier time migrating to Office 2007 because I followed the redesign pretty closely through the designer’s blogs, so I understood the rationale behind many of the decisions that they made. Most people are not so nerdy, however, and my reaction to the Social Text changes today reminded me of that. It just goes to show that no matter how great your redesign is, how many usability studies you’ve done, or how well you’ve marketed the new look and tried to prepare users for it, users will nearly always resist change—initially. And you’ve got a good thing going if they put up with it while they adapt.

What do you think of the new Social Text user interface? How do you normally adapt to new designs? Have you ever stopped using a product because the user interface was poorly designed?