Sometimes the best decision is to do nothing

Contrary to Cheryl Crow, sometimes a change will not do you good. Designers and marketing experts have a natural desire to change things to keep them fresh. But sometimes the best possible customer experience is to keep what works.

I was sure my browser had lost its mind this after­noon when I launched Google Reader to catch up on my RSS feeds. What hap­pened to the color? Why don’t things look the same? I closed down and restarted and it still wasn’t look­ing right. That’s when I noticed the banner at the top explain­ing that Google had updated the design of Google Reader.

Old Google Reader

New Google Reader

The new google reader is bland, col­or­less, and not nearly as visu­ally appeal­ing as the older ver­sion. In the related arti­cle, they explain the rea­sons behind the changes:

Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user expe­ri­ence. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and respon­sive, we’ve removed some visual clut­ter, sim­pli­fied some fea­tures and given every­thing a bit more breath­ing room. 

My sug­ges­tion would have been to find a way to make things faster with­out taking away all the visual ele­ments. If speed is the only goal, this is the fastest load­ing web page.

So join­ing the Face­book redesign as both con­fus­ing and poorly done, we can add Google Reader as one for chang­ing and taking some­thing appeal­ing and useful and scal­ing it back to look like 1998 again.

Some­times the best thing to do is nothing.