Should organizations make a big deal about doing a major overhaul and re-launch of their web sites? Jared Spool, a usability design engineer who blogs at UIE Brain Sparks, thinks organizations would be better off making incremental change. In The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, he writes that over his 10 years of work with web design, “if we’ve learned anything, it’s that redesigns rarely improve a site.”
“At best,” he writes, a redesign “just rearranges the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is trying to attract.”
Spool wrote about this way back in 2003 (that was two re-launches ago for UMR) and urged organizations to consider “subtle evolution” as a way to incorporate changes on websites. He pointed out a few high-profile, real-world examples — Amazon, Yahoo and eBay — that have all benefited from this philosophy.
Andy writes! 
We’ve just redesigned our homepage without making a “relaunch” out of and it’s worked well. It was in response to some research we’d carried out but already is in need of a few more tweaks as a result of the change.
I’m a huge fan of incremental change if only for the reason that people have more to discover each time they visit the siite rather than seeing a fundamental difference annually.
Thanks, Cole, for your comments. Your university’s site has a nice, clean design.
Andrew
no problem, I very much enjoy this blog.
I can’t take the credit for the design though, that was a talented chap called Ed Comley who works with us in the web team (http://www.ebcomley.co.uk – site under redesign!)