A boring Web site doesn’t warrant a redesign

If visitors can find what they need quickly, consider your site a success

Customers are much more likely to get impatient with your Web site than they are to be bored by it.

When was the last time you were bored with a Web site? Do you get bored with Google? Amazon? Perhaps the last book you bought from Amazon was boring, but was the Web site itself boring to use?

How about Facebook or Twitter? You might get bored with your friends but it’s unlikely that those sites bored you. When Facebook announced that they were redesigning their site, did everyone go: “Great! We’re so bored with the old one!”

Quite the opposite. “After a redesign in March, a Facebook poll revealed that 94 percent of users didn’t like the changes,” Caitlin McDevitt wrote for Slate in February 2010. “When Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, students organized to protest against it.”

The Facebook changes may have been the right thing to do. In the long-term, people may find them useful. However, they liked the old design because they were used to it. They didn’t want change. Often, the organization wants change much more than the customer.