Last week, FeedBurner announced a significant redesign of their site. I didn’t post on it right away because the basic stats functionality remains the same. People are generally quite happy with the change. And I have to say FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools – without it I would have a very difficult time understanding how much of our traffic was coming through our RSS feed.
Overall, however, though I don’t think the redesign was a success. I am finding that I am clicking (and waiting) much more often than I was previously to find the stats I care about (24 hour recap and item readership stats). Too much information is available only through secondary pages. A better information architecture would make that information more readily available. I also think the site is a full generation behind the state of the art – adding ajax would speed things up somewhat and significantly reduce necessary clicks and refreshes. Some of the applications I am beta testing quite frankly make FeedBurner look very bad in comparison. fiftyfoureleven has additional thoughts as well. I am a big fan of FeedBurner, so take this criticism very lightly. 99% of what they do, they do extremely well, and frankly that is (mostly) all that matters. We’ve written previously about FeedBurner on July 15, 2005 , July 4, 2005 and June 14, 2005 .
