Merry Christmas

I've woken up on Saturday morning understanding that I have all sorts of thoughts whirring around in my head that won't settle down until I release them on to the page. I was trying to resist doing that but I don't think I have a choice. Like so many Saturdays this year, the weather is awful, bad enough to prevent me gaining any respite from a cycle or a run. I need to clear some room for other things to think about. So this is a personal catharsis. Reading is optional!

I had hoped that by now I would have adapted to the new blip interface and would be using it with enthusiasm. I had expected it to be a difficult adjustment but had also fully expected to grow into it pretty quickly. That is not happening - which is mostly down to me. This has come at a bad time. I've had a couple of 12 hour days in the office this week. The end of the year always seems to be a particularly hard period. I've been coming to these changes feeling rather irritable and fed up with sitting at the computer. In the past, signing into blipfoto at the end of a long day has never been a chore. It was never hard on sore eyes. I have always got pleasure from posting my picture and words and seeing a new addition to my journal. The presentation of the latest entry and the thumbnails (always carefully chosen) simply gave me great satisfaction. I've not been getting that feeling this week. I've not been getting any kind of blip glow. I've not really felt any desire to fight the interface to connect with other blippers. It's hard to pin down why exactly, and it seems almost silly to say so, but somehow the magic has gone.

As to why, part of that I know is just my current frame of mind. I'm known to be a rather smiley sort of guy, generally happy for the most part, but come Christmas that seems to change. It's as if the effort to be cheerful all the time just wears me out come the end of the year. I've always been known as the Crimblegrump in my family. So these changes have come at a time when I have no patience for change, nor incompetence. Which is the other part of the problem.

Blipfoto has been an album for my daily photograph. I loved its professional feel. But it feels now like someone has taken all the pictures out of my classy old album and stuck them back in a cheap one with the bottom of the picture folded back under the page because they no longer fit. Most of my images are square format, which means that on each page I have to scroll down to the bottom and click on the resize button to view the whole image, and then the white background changes to black, which I find just as jarring. The contrast is a shock to the eyes. Rather then getting used to it, I fear it is just bugging me more and more. I can only guess that the experience might be better on other devices, but I have no access to any of those to know. I can reduce the scale of the page in the browser but that then makes the text too small to read comfortably. And I can't expect other people to fiddle around to do the same. Browsing through my journal is simply no longer a pleasing thing to do.

And then there are the thumbnails, the other way of viewing my journal. When I view my own set right now they just look wrong in terms of crop, and silly with my name on each one. It's a small thing I know but it all adds up to just not feeling at home any more. I could also point out how little changes might well make a huge difference to the ethos of the site. I rather liked before not knowing immediately to which journal a thumbnail belonged. It was fun to guess. It also encouraged you to make lucky dips. I think I find myself clicking far more now on the names that I recognise, possibly because it is now much harder, if you have lots of subscriptions at least, to go to specific journals. That's not really a criticism, just an observation. Little things like this can have big effects on how a site is used.

The thumbnail issues will be sorted for sure. The image size problem was fixed quite quickly and then reverted, which makes me a little worried that there isn't a bigger problem. Perhaps the design emphasis on mobile devices means that the concerns of dinosaurs like me using laptops and desktops are going to be overlooked. We shall see. For the time being, this experience is currently frustrating me too much. And, for clarity, that has far more to do with me than blipfoto. I'm in a frame of mind where I find myself looking for negatives, which is really quite unlike me. If I'm in a situation like that I find it best to remove myself from it. I have made a lot of friends here. I won't disappear, but I think this is a good time to take a break, to perhaps return when all the problems have been sorted out. I doubt the magic will ever return, but hopefully, when the work in progress is completed and our major concerns have been addressed, it will return to being a positive experience. I really hope so. And I sincerely wish the team luck with all that. I do understand, better than most indeed, just how hard this job is.

Finally, a positive to take from all this is truly understanding the importance of change management. And, to my mind, this has been a perfect lesson in how not to manage change. None of us was expecting such a radical restructuring of our home on the internet. And that concept of home is really important, far more important than I and certainly anyone at Blipcentral had realised. Nobody minds going out one day and finding their house cleaned and given a fresh coat of paint, and fitted out with a brand new set of appliances - which is what I think most people were expecting. Instead, our house has been whitewashed with many of our favourite things removed. There are some new appliances left lying around, but with no instructions as to how to use them. It's really no wonder so many blippers are upset.

People are generally resistant to change and in recognition of that it is essential to ease the pain as much as possible. I've still seen no roadmap from blipcentral. When we go through this same exercise in my company, possibly around this very time next year, I know how important it will be to involve our users in the process, let them know about the changes in advance and why they are being made, and if everything isn't immediately ready on release, let them know when features are to be expected. At the end of the day, they are our paying customers. Without them we don't have a business. Communication is everything.

Have a great Christmas everybody.