The New Sitemeter Makes Me Want To Throw Things
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Blogging, TechnologyHow could they get it so wrong?
Exhibit A - Scrolling within boxes?
I’m sorry, but anybody who knows anything about User Interface design would never make you scroll to see, well, nothing. I mean, this is amateur hour.
Now, I could easily detail another dozen things that are immediately awful about the new design, but it looks as if they’ve been hearing about it from the mob and the “new” sitemeter is heading to the gallows…
We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know.
Burn it. Drown it. Kill it. And then burn it some more.
And seriously consider firing whoever thought this was good design. Because they nearly destroyed your company.
Oh, and don’t ever launch something without user testing it again.
Thank you.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Blogging, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
They did have open betas for it. I’m surprised the beta testers didn’t say nay to the design.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Couldn’t have said it better… Problem is I can’t even log into my sitemeter account because the password doesn’t work and apparently it takes over 8 hours for sitemeter to email you your password.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Wow, very surprised that they’re going to roll back. You would think they were fully serious and committed to putting out a new design and that they’d hold their ground.
Maybe next time around they should do something like facebook, and give people a choice on whether or not they can use a new design, and once they get all the kinks worked out launch it globally.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
[...] # 3: Stephen Green still isn’t happy and neither is Justin Gardner Related [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Hey, at least if Obama wins, and they lose their job, they can go to work putting together the national healthcare exchange website! There is an upside to incompetence.
September 14th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
They took something that was simple and worked and replaced it with something that was complicated and didn’t. At least they were quick to realise their mistake!
September 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
[...] it turned out not very well at all. “Burn it. Drown it. Kill it. And then burn it some more. [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
I took a quick look at it this morning and could not figure out how to see the referral sites, which is the only thing I am really interested in. I thought - “that must just be me, they could not have left that out of the free site. I won’t think about that now, I’ll check back later.” Now it’s gone.
Saved me a lot teeth gnashing.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I thought Sitemeter was quite an adequate tool until today when they took away anything interesting you’d want to see about your site on the free version. It also had no way to customize what you are looking at, which was nothing. There was nothing to see except an hourly report on how many people visited.
It did, however, make me take the leap to Google Analytics, which we know will stay free for a long time coming. The only problem is that it is overkill for people like me with a small blog that I track weekly and don’t have advertising etc.
Well now they are back to the old version, but the harm has been done. Now I don’t trust them at all.