A couple of months ago, the SiteMeter service made a big mistake with the code that it injects into all its customer sites; the result was that everyone visiting any of those sites with Internet Explorer got a dialog box that said "Operation Aborted." This past weekend, SiteMeter made another mistake: it tried to do an abrupt mass upgrade of its service's user interface.

The new interface wasn't received well by many SiteMeter users, for example the ones here, here, and here. There were login problems, reporting problems, interface problems, and just plain problems.

Only hours after several sites posted news stories about the update, SiteMeter rolled back to the old interface. That seems to have been more than a trivial job, because they shut down the whole SiteMeter.comWeb site for several hours to make it happen. It's an embarrassing retreat.

Many sites make their new user interfaces available as a "beta" for several months before requiring users to migrate. I'm sure the SiteMeter developers wanted to avoid maintaining both the old interface and the new interface; it's a hassle to have two things to maintain and two ways to get at the data. The need for compatibility limits the kind of changes that you can make to the underlying database, since it needs to work with both systems. So this approach would seem to save development time.

The alternative, the path that SiteMeter chose, was an abrupt overnight-change approach. Customers go to bed one night knowing how to use the service, and they wake up the next day unable to find their way around, if they can even log in at all. Users had no way to come up to speed on the new system until it was live, but they couldn't retreat to the comfort of the familiar old system. Forcing users into a sudden switch on a system they haven't had the time to learn is a recipe for dissatisfaction.