CLICKETY CLICK (The dooyoo Redesign)

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Product:	The dooyoo Redesign
Date:	08/09/02 (1 review reads)
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Advantages: Dooyoo could make more money

Disadvantages: users could feel ignored

It was a tidal wave of anger which threatened to engulf the site. Dooyoo unveiled its £8m Aurora revamp to a chorus of catcalls and jeers from members. There may have been a cheer or two from the back but few noticed in all the din.

Dooyooers it seems were not impressed with the relaunch of their beloved site. The revamp currently has a satisfaction rating of just 17 per cent.

Some of the fury was undoubtedly a Luddite backlash. Some people oppose change because they are comfortable with the way things are ( I was not a member the last time the site was relaunched but reading ops by people who were it seems there was a similar howl of outrage.)

But there were other, more genuine reasons. Techno glitches made the site virtually unusable and left members deeply frustrated. Problems are natural with major computer projects but surely they shouldn't hit bread and butter activities like logging in, rating, commenting and submitting ops. Dooyoo plugged Aurora like mad and when it failed to deliver it was a major blow.

One member was particularly upset because he had offered to test the new site before it went live. He posted an op savaging the relaunch, as close to a kamikaze word attack as you can get. Then a senior dooyoo manager intervened. She posted an op saying advertisers were dismayed by members' barrage of criticism of Aurora. If you rate below three stars you won't get your pennies, she warned. There was some debate over whether it was a hoax as members hit the roof. It was not Dooyoo's finest hour.

Now, some of the bugs have been swotted and we are all using Aurora more or less as it is meant to be. So has it been worth all the pain? Is Dooyoo a better place for writers, consumers, advertisers and the company?

I am not a big fan of the revamp but think it is the price we pay for the site's continued success. I can live with it. The changes, I believe, are meant to boost the number of use
r "clicks" and reflect a growing commercialisation and bias towards advertisers.

Dooyoo makes money from ad banners. It also takes a slice of sales made through shops on its site. In May 2002 it had 200,000 registered users and 4.3 million page impressions. That's a lot but these are salad days for internet companies and it could do with more. It wants users to spend more time clicking. Page impressions are what advertising charges are based on. The more there are, the more it can charge.

I reckon this is why pages load faster (if you run Popup Stopper to avoid those infuriating interruptions) but you have to click on more links and buttons to get to where you want to go. Rating has become simpler, with clearer buttons and just one click instead of dropdown and click, but you still have to nominate for a crown seperately and you still have to click to add someone to your circle of friends and click again to receive notifiction when they post an op.

The biggest casualty has been the loss of the latest ops dropdown menu. It was streets ahead of anything offered by rival sites such as Ciao. In the good old days it took two clicks to go to an op, now it takes three. Progress? Apparently the drop down menu is coming back so we shall see.

Same goes for logging in. Previously you could log in on your home page and your password would be automatically entered once you had typed in your user name. Now you have to click through to another page to log in and enter both user name and password.

Relagating Speakers Corner to a link on the community page does not bode well for its future and I miss the miles counter at the top righthand corner of the page. Guest books remain absent and you can still only see three of your circle of friends. Putting the community category on its own at the top right of the page is no good if you have a 15ins monitor and can't see it.

I am confused too by the way ops are organis
ed. It seems they are grouped by product type so you have to know in advance what you are looking for. Displaying only the three top ops in a category means you are unlikely to get miles if your op drops off the list.

A long list, but there are things I do like. The new colour scheme gives the site a fresher, tidier look without going too far along the sterile Ciao route (it would have been nice to have binned the "time ops are posted" feature though - they are pointless and messy).

Dooyoo has to make a profit if it is to last. It has spent £8 million to keep ahead of the pack. But the relaunch has sparked fears it doesn't/hasn't listened to members. Rightly or wrongly, some people feel their voice has been ignored. I hope Dooyoo remembers it rides roughshod over users at its peril. Its task is fairly to balance the needs of users, whether writers or consumers, with those of advertisers. Has Aurora truly done that? Perhaps if revenue stream goes up, so too could the miles award per read for ops.

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