All Your Sites Belong to Us

Three major web site redesigns in the last several weeks - Facebook, iGoogle and Yahoo - have sparked outrage from a small but influential group of users. ReadWriteWeb breaks each of these down. As I read their account it occurred to me that a dramatic shift has occurred. Companies don't really own their web sites anymore. We do.

Time Magazine with its Person of the Year cover story decried 2006 as the year of You, the empowered consumer. At the time they wrote...

And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

But just two years later, something exceptional has happened. We now "own" the web even more than we did back then when all we simply did was create viable homegrown alternatives to big media sites.

Nowadays, if there's an online experience we dislike, we either demand that it be changed, use Greasemonkey to fix things ourselves or just vote with our feet. That's a major shift from the level of empowerment that we thought was remarkable even just two years ago.

Since the dawn of the decade there have been several major breakdown in systems that we thought were a sure thing. First it was our national security (September 11), then major companies failed (Enron/Worldcom) and finally, more recently, our financial system tanked (Lehman Brothers). The result is our trust in institutions continues to erode. These events might seem detached from a silly web site design, but they're not. Each encouraged people to take greater control of all aspects their lives - and to live to the fullest, even online.

No matter the site, a lot of time and effort goes into building a solid user experience. There's always a chance you're going to alienate 50% of your audience when you go through the process. But in this age - more than ever - the best approach is to redesign web sites collaboratively with consumers and all out in the open so that we really feel like the changes are ours not just yours.

That's preciely what Dell did starting late last year - and it proved smart. Others should take note.