January always brings with it the urge to make changes. New year’s resolutions result in a swarm of  suddenly weight-conscious folks descending on gyms for 2-3 weeks, before gradually reverting to their sedentary ways. As health experts have been preaching for years, most people fail to keep up with their exercise resolution because they try to impose too big of a change on themselves, too quickly. Sudden, drastic changes upset the balance and result in backlash.

What does that have to do with a Web site?

Glad you asked. Using the exercise resolution as a parallel, let’s look at what happens to your users when you suddenly change the layout and design of your Web site.

Suppose you have a site that has been humming along happily for a few months, a couple of years, whatever. Your visitors know what to expect when they come to your site, and they know how to find things once they get there. They are, in short, comfortable with your site.

One day you decide that your site is looking a little dated (it happens to the best of them!). So, you commission a complete redesign. The layout of your site changes completely, several of the old navigation links disappear, and now you’ve got much sleeker and more modern processes working in the background, which don’t exactly let users do the same things they used to do, but hey – it’s modern!

Except, none of your users like the new interface; they complain that it’s no longer intuitive, not as useful as before, and, in a word, it sucks.

You’ve just experienced the same problem that the resolution-maker encounters: trying to change too much too fast, and running into resistance immediately.

Some of the biggest online brands have followed this exact path (hello, Facebook). And while the user base might stick around long enough to decide that the changes are things they can live with after all, they also might not – and why take that risk?

Next week we’ll look at a solution to this dilemma.

Photo by Kim Bost