When "improvement" becomes experience rot

Another of Jared Spool’s wonderful rants: Experience Rot. It starts out with what you expect, a description of how rot starts with version 2 and over time gets worse. “Okay, whatever”, I hear you saying. “I have to show my bosses/clients fresh new work!”

He hits on something meaningful that you should think about:

It’s experience rot that opens a market up for disruption. The market leader, slowed down and overly complex, gives a chance for a new company to make inroads. By studying the small number of features that most users care about, and freed by not having a large codebase to deal with, they can implement a simplified version. This version is much easier for new users and a straightforward transition for the more experienced user base.

What Spool is writing about is most applicable to product design, but it applies to website redesigns too. (What is a website redesign if not version 2.0+ of a product?)

Whether in agency or in-house work, we try to out-do our previous work. Adding on design elements and movement and “surprise and delight” and bells and whistles and new content and and and AND—

STOP.

Maybe we should approach a redesign as though we were pruning a tree to keep it healthy, strong and tall. What can we remove that isn’t serving many people? What can we simplify or consolidate?

So here’s a challenge. Next redesign project you’re involved with, look at what already exists and ask yourself “What could I prune away to make the rest stronger?”