Delicious.com guides 5 million users into a new experience
Move over del.icio.us, get ready for Delicious.com
When the social bookmarking site launched it’s redesign yesterday, they faced a typical challenge: how to inform, educate, and excite their existing user base about the changes to a well used interface (delicious has ~5 million users).
This challenge is faced by all of us who roll out new products or significant upgrades to an existing user base, and the way that delicious approached it is truly inspirational.
In keeping with the “web 2.0” nature of their product, they put together a promotional video that smoothly takes you from the old into the new, animating several of the key changes (the periods from the site’s old address “del.icio.us” fall out of the word and bounce off the screen while “.com” falls from the sky to hang off the end and produce “delicious.com”) and fluidly demonstrating new features.
Of particular interest is the way that pieces of the old UI morph into the new one, an innovative way to say, ‘you know this thing here? well, we moved it over there and made it look like that.’
Why this works is not an accident; state glue is critical to bringing people along while elements are changing and plays to thousands of years of human evolution. In other words, forward-looking predators are hard-wired to track movement and depth.
Overall the delicious promo is … delicious. It’s short, light-hearted, and shows you around without using one static picture or word of dialog.
I see lots of opportunity for these techniques to inject vibrancy and vitality into engaging site tours, help documentation, and application demos.