This week’s Sunday Business section on New York Times has an interesting article about Yahoo!’s approach revamping their homepage: one bit at a time.

Comparing to having a beta page that migrates users gradually, changing things bit by bit is not the practice that I am very familiar with. But the idea itself - to let users to adopt new usage patterns in a step by step fashion - does seem very practical and convincing to me. For websites that have millions of customers (including my company), any change, whether it’s good or bad, runs a huge risk of alienating existing users, and the impact is sometimes unpredictable.

Well, think Facebook’s recent profile / app platform changes.

“If you go from light to dark by flipping a switch, your eyes may hurt for a minute or two, you may end up being able to see faster if you use the dimmer.” - Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!

Link: Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps (NYT Oct. 17, 2008)