Moniker User Interface Redesign: Success or Failure From UX POV?

From a user interface perspective I rate if "not an improvement"

[Webwork]

Here's the new links at-the-top-of-the new Moniker user panel:

Home / Find Domains / Domain Auctions / Domain Appraisal & Brokerage / Domain Products / News & Resources / My Account

These links run across the prime (easy to spot) screen real estate AND they are also in a bold font.

I've read, and I believe, that IF your business is about serving your user's priority interests THEN you design your website - especially your user control panel - so that what your users most often "do" (what links they most often click) determines where the most obvious and most readily accessible links go.

To me the redesign is more about claiming screen real estate for the purpose of drawing attention to what other services Moniker or its parent company wishes to promote (Auctions, Appraisals, "Products" (Domain Sponsor Parking, Snapnames), News and Resource (Not really - it's all about SnapNames and Moniker) . . . versus what a logged-in user needs or wants to do with their domains.

Sometime it feels like the business world just doesn't get it: you take care of people, especially your existing customers and their interests first, AND THEN the money/income/profits follow.

IMHO, the redesign clearly doesn't fall into "take care of your users first" paradigm.

[robho]

Ugh. It's in the currently-fashionable hint-of-pale-blue and hint-of-grey text on white that is just about unreadable. Don't these "designers" ever get out into the real world where text should be designed for reading?

What's worse is I hunted for a support contact to ask if there is any way to change the colors (to something with a bit of contrast) and find I have to re-register just to ask about my existing account. That is so customer-unfriendly and lazy, they can't even be bothered to program a single sign on, expect the user to do the work instead.

I'm not sure that actually doing anything on the site has changed that much, they've just made it less readable. A lot more scrolling needed to perform the same actions as before, as the actions are down the side rather than across the top of the list of domains.

Really though it's the pastel colours for text that is the killer. For the first time it makes me want to investigate over-riding stylesheets with a local one, just to be able to use it. Compare the readability of "Moniker has changed it's look. Learn more about our new site design." with the pale stuff below it.

I completely agree with you about looking after existing customers, and the best way to do that is to make a site useful and usable. This redesign doesn't do anything there, makes it worse.

[bill]

It looks like minor cosmetic changes only. I don't see any real interface changes. The back-end works the same, but the links are in different places. Maybe I need to spend more time with the interface.

Is there an announcement of the changes made?

[Webwork]

I haven't seen an announcement discussing the specific design changes or their rationale.

I'm in the "don't make me think, don't make me go looking for the link" design camp. When there's a redesign that forces me to visually hunt for the links I'm most likely/often to use it leads me to believe the redesign isn't for my benefit.

In this case, the new links/navigation that was "visually centered" in the GUI were added IMHO for the "benefit" of increased sales, not for the benefit of the UX.

The "My Account" link is "visually buried" all the way to the top right.

About 3/4 of my "Dashboard" is built around BIG bold links to 3 services (escrow, appraisal, payment) I rarely/never use.

When I click on the "My Domains" link, to view and manage my domains, I don't even see the first domain without scrolling down because even on that page the entire screen is taken up with links to "that which I do not need at the moment . . if ever". They could pull down the 25% of the vertical space that is occupied by not much more than:

~<p>My name
~<p>My account #
~<p>My security setting

Do I really need to have this same stuff "on screen" at every step of the way as I manage my domains/account? No.

Notice, however, how all this needless redundancy is swept away when I click on a link to a new product or service that is being sold via links inside my GUI. No sense in having this needless distraction when there's important business to do.