Several Web 2.0 sites have recently done redesigns, with an overall trend of simplifying their user interfaces, making things easier for us users.

I like this. I’m starting to value accessibility and usability over cool yet complex features and the display of every statistic available. There are so many Web 2.0 sites competing for a attention that one way of turning “catch and release” into “catch and keep” is to make the act of a user returning and participating super easy. I love Twitter partly because it’s brain dead easy. Since it only takes me a few seconds to Twitter via Twitterrific, I participate much more often.

Second, I feel that less technical, mainstream users are likely to just give up when confronted with too many stats and information. As evidenced by this recent PEW report, there are a lot of folks out there who just aren’t into technology. You know who I mean, the folks who when you mention “Web 2.0″ they say, “Wha?” and their upgrading to Vista will wait until they buy a new computer sometime in 2010. Simplifying a site’s UI is surely essential to get these folks to register for the first time.

Anyhow, so here are some sites with recent redesigns:

Hubpages: This site looks completely new - even the logo. There’s a step by step explanation of the site’s purpose. The avatars are also much larger than before.

Old.

New.

Newsvine: I talked about Newsvine’s redesign a while back. Their 60 second Newsvine tour worked really well on me.

Fanpop: A lot of subtle changes to an already solid site. There are less confusing stats, more information about users, and much improved video capabilities because we all like to watch those cool, viral videos. They also added a cool “picks” feature that lets users create simple polls.

Technorati: The number of links was combined with the number of blogs linking in to produce just one stat: Technorati Authority. I’ve also noticed changes to the way your blog is presented with the sites linking in and who has made it a favorite.

Microsoft Hotmail: This is a really fascinating read about how the development team was hard at work on a Web 2.0 version, but through user testing decided to abandon that approach. The result, just released, has a more “classic” interface.

Google Analytics: This one showed up just yesterday, and I’m still getting my head around its awesomeness. Before, the pie charts appeared at an angle. While that looked kinda cool, was it really necessary? So now, pies are just a big circle, making it easier to gauge fractions. Before, views were categorized by job description (?). Now, they concern the sought-after information. Trend lines are now similar to Google Finance where a sweep of the cursor lets you easily peek at stats for an individual day over a period of time. I think the Google brains are checking out the work of Edward Tufte, and I’d love to see this level of design applied to other Google apps. Even in the tiny screen shots below, you can see how the most important information a user is likely looking for appears in large, bold numbers.

Old.

New.

So to sum up, does anybody recall Microsoft Word 6.0 for the Mac? I remember it as being a bloated program that didn’t seem to run any faster, with tons of confusing buttons. It was so annoying that I kept on using Word 5.0.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Word’s history:

Word 5.1 for the Macintosh, released in 1992, was a popular word processor due to its elegance, relative ease of use, and feature set. However, version 6.0 for the Macintosh, released in 1994, was widely derided, unlike the Windows version. It was the first version of Word based on a common codebase between the Windows and Mac versions; many accused it of being slow, clumsy and memory intensive.

Here’s the take from Buggin’ My Life Away:

Moreover, while people complained about the performance, the biggest complaint we kept hearing about Mac Word 6.0 was that it wasn’t “Mac-like.” So, we spent a lot of time drilling down into what people meant when they said it wasn’t “Mac-like.” We did focus groups. Some of us hung out in various Usenet newsgroups. We talked to product reviewers. We talked to friends who used the product. It turns out that “Mac-like” meant Mac Word 5.0.

This may seem rather illogical from the developer’s point of view, but users = customers.

In the quest to keep “ahead of the game” I think a lot of sites keep piling on features which may just serve to confuse old users and scare away new ones. Let’s not forget that both Microsoft and Yahoo! thought they had web search wrapped up when along came Google with a dead simple search strategy and a home page with practically nothing on it.

Disclosure: My friend Dave is a founder of FanPop. I have no financial interest in the company.

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