Whoops, Your UX Is Showing

Back in my days as an advertising copywriter, one of the rote insults—and we had a bunch—was “Whoops, your strategy is showing.” It was generally reserved for an ad deemed too obvious in its creative execution.

I was reminded of this recently after coming across three different, highly transactional sites that  trumpeted changes to either interface or interaction design based on user research.

How do I know the changes were made based on research? Well, because two out of the three say as much. This presents an interesting dilemma, to which three big brands found similar answers to:

When tweaking an interface, do you have to tell users that you did so? Or do you just make corrections/improvements and move on?

Staples’ solution was particularly egregious with giant look-at-me arrows pointing to things like “simple navigation.”

www.Staples.com/sbd/content/copyandprint

Citi's approach was explanatory and welcome.

Citi Credit Cards (post-login)

Firefox’s response was the most tasteful. And also the one where I wasn’t sure that the impetus for change came from within or from external users.

Mozilla Firefox Start Page

I see this type of approach making sense for sites with a high rate of returning users where a change to the UI might be met with apprehension or errors or outright abandonment. But we all know how much Google, Facebook and Yahoo have changed over the years and I can’t recall any of them doing something like this. Can you?