I just finished reading this great article about the perils of redesigning major websites. The author illustrates the “Kubler-Ross hatefest” that a redesign invariably incites. To wit…

Denial: Why on earth did you change it? The site was fine the way it was.

Anger: My twelve-year-old could have done better!, F***  you, I’ll never use this site again.

Bargaining: At least give us the option to use the old version.

Depression: I used to love this site. Now I can’t bring myself to use it. I miss [feature X]

Acceptance: Actually, I’ve been using it for two weeks now and it’s not that bad.

I think most of the nd.edu redesign team would concur with the validity of these stages.

The best part of the article however was the following story about a redesign experience from the eBay design team:

…the classic eBay redesign story, which I assumed to be apocryphal but have been assured by insiders is true.

In a nutshell, a meaningless background was removed from a seller page. Pandemonium. After strong resistance the background was reinstated, to everyone’s satisfaction. In fact, the rebellious users were so placated that they failed to notice the designers slowly adjusting the background’s hex values over the next few months. The background got lighter and lighter until one day “pop!” it was gone.

More then likely, this is how we should have approached the dark blue background on nd.edu. Instead of digging the trenches and settling in with our provisions to fight a long protracted battle, we should have just started with plain white and slowly added a slightly darker value every day until we eventually hit our desired blue, with no one being the wiser.