How to be fearless and cautious with a redesign

The folks in the online department at the Poynter Institute are working on a major redesign for Poynter.org (aka, Poynter Online). It’ll be the first significant overhaul of the website, a resource and training tool for journalists, in 5 or 6 years. In fact, the last big redesign pre-dated the last two eyetracking studies conducted by Poynter, so this one should incorporate some of the knowledge gleaned from that research. (Disclaimer: I was the project manager on one of those studies about 3 years ago.)

This video produced by the Poynter staff offers some good tips about the process of redesigning a website that’s already popular with users — enhancing their experience without annoying them. As Poynter online director Bill Mitchell says, “I want to be both fearless and cautious at the same time” in implementing this redesign.