Under a Cloud

I would love to have been a fly on the wall at blipcentral today! I think we now realise just how brave a decision it was to relaunch the site ahead of time. Those old servers must surely have been on their very last legs, but I guess we knew that anyway. And it's not just about the servers and adding capacity, but about a more resilient and versatile architecture. Our images are now sitting in the Amazon cloud, above a rain forest perhaps? Our precious photographs are spread out as vaporous 0s and 1s on servers we know not where, nor how many. It's extraordinary really, as is our trust, although I think it is well enough placed. That said, however, one of my old images has gone missing in the transition. I'm trusting that it can be recovered when the dust settles (or should I say when it stops raining).

I was really quite upset last night at the changes but that has been assuaged somewhat by the realisation that this is very much a work in progress. I still can't quite get my head around how it is that really basic design concepts have been ignored though. I suspect that this new design has not had any real user testing. We are doing that now and feeding back issues by the bucket load. The software developer in me would actually love right now to have his sleeves rolled up getting his hands dirty in the code and making this interface work. I did feel a bit better this morning when I had a peek at the script on the main page and could see that the image sizing problem wasn't a major design oversight but a simple error in the algorithm which decides which size of image to display. That did get fixed this afternoon, but was then unfixed, presumably because it broke something somewhere else. It's not an easy business.

It's been fascinating to keep an eye on the forum today. That has shown what an impossibly difficult task this is. Opinion seems totally divided between those who love the new look and those who loathe it - to the point where people are suggesting they are actually going to leave. I suspect they will come around after a while but it is still amazing to see such polarity in the response. I guess we really all are very different creatures.

To offer up a slightly more considered opinion than last night's, I feel that the site has lost its uniqueness. There are quite a few things that now work better, with many more to come I'm sure, but it no longer looks as if it has been actually designed. Perhaps that's because of a system of creation by committee rather than being the result of the vision of one person. It does not stand out from all the other sites out there. It's vanilla blip. We've lost the beautiful typography and the attention to detail that very much attracted me to the site in the first place. I don't hate it, but it's hard to see myself ever loving it like I did the previous version.

There is a lesson for me here in my own business. We have an interface which is unique and most definitely different from anything else out there. We too, albeit at a much earlier stage, are in the process of redesigning for multiple platforms. I'm very determined that in this process we are not going to lose our uniqueness for the sake of simplicity. I don't want to compromise by adopting the lowest common denominator approach. I fear that is what has happened here.

My last gripe has to be about communication, which for a site which is so much about communication, continues to be very poor. Blipcentral have said that some features are not going to be available right away, just as other less used features will be removed. For heavens sake, let us know what's coming and what's not to avoid the endless speculation and grumbling. You must know. Tell us.

Finally, a belated vote of congratulations on a reasonably successfully migration. The site is very responsive now and that's a huge win. And although there are quite a few bugs and usability issues, it does actually work! It can't have been easy. Well done! 

But I still feel under a cloud, and not just an Amazonian one!