Why are these two statements true? 1) When a mainstream media website redesigns, it is unequivocally despised by its audience. [Always.] 2) When a social media website redesigns, it is adored by its audience. [Almost always.]

Someone might try to say “because all media websites suck” and/or “because all social media websites are awesome,” but I don’t think we can possibly believe that’s true.

Is this because the audiences are different? The expectations? The difficulty? The organization? The goals?

(I ask this as someone who has designed both successful social media sites and very large mainstream media sites. And witnessed this phenomena over and over.)

Sure, users can customize their page to get down to the subset that they care about. But I don’t feel I should have to do that to get to the stuff I care about.

Are you guys trying to drag-race the new features and see what people do & don’t use, and trim/add as appropriate?

I don’t want newsvine.com’s home to be another Live/iGoogle/My Yahoo/My MSN…

As far as the new design is concerned, did you already have a pretty clear idea of what you wanted to do, based on months of user feedback?

How did you go about testing the changes? Did you do much lo-fi prototyping? I’d love to know more about how you go about making significant changes to such a big site.

1. The audiences of many mainstream media sites are there almost automatically and not so much out of choice. A lot of people who go to ESPN.com go there because they watch ESPN TV. A lot of people go to MSN because their browser hardcoded it as their start page. Visitors to social media sites are there because they’ve expressly decided to be there. They already like it a lot.

2. Sites run by smaller companies may be more in touch with their audiences than sites run by larger companies. I’m the CEO of Newsvine and every time someone does so much as report a spacing bug on our site, I know about it automatically, via automated email. When all of these user emails seep into your collective unconscious over the course of months, you already know your marching orders come redesign time.

3. Bigger companies often *can’t* do all they want to do with their sites for political, technological, and other reasons. They are launching with the knowledge internally that only it weren’t for legacy systems, they would be free to do a lot more.

4. Users of social media sites are just a lot more tolerant to change… that’s why they are there in the first place.

On the bright side, I can say that at least during my time at ESPN, the bad feelings from users usually subsided after a few weeks after users got comfortable and realized all that had been improved. That said, I am pleasantly surprised and shocked that seemingly 99% of the comments on our announcement thread are quite positive so far.

I need to re-introduce regular newsvining into my life (kind of slacked off after it nearly got me fired last year) and this is a good catalyst.