How NOT to start a relaunch
OpenBC is a German community site, similar to LinkedIn or Orkut. It appears that they recently decided their Web site wasn’t up to snuff. So what do they do? They kick off a relaunch effort. And that, apparently, is where it all goes pear-shaped.
Today, they sent an email to *all* their members (OpenBC has quite a lot of them), asking everybody to participate in “openDesign” the openBC redesign effort.
In the email they sent a link to their redesign Web site, along with an invitation to participate and the promise of EUR 10.000 (plus a chance of a job) for the chosen design.
It appears that these mails were actually sent out to all OpenBC subscribers at the same time; not to a focus group, or in a segmented fashion (a couple hundred each day). No — all at once. When everybody (including me) clicked on the link in the mail, this is what we got:
The message is “Sorry buddy, you’re one of quite a few people….”. Sorry, buddy?? Can a Web error message be any more condescending and misworded? Short of “Piss off, you’re killing our server”, I can’t think how.
Now — they’re German, I’m German. So I think I kind of sorta know what they meant to say. But ’sorry buddy’? Did they buy one of Monty Python’s rude phrasebooks? Or was today casual day and they took their inspiration from their office attire? Isn’t this supposed to be a professional community and networking site?
In the meantime, their server seems to have imploded or molten down and the redesign site is still offline. So I don’t know what their spiffy new design looks like.
But frankly, buddies, I can’t be arsed to check any more.
Tags: OpenBC; redesign; Screwup; Buddy
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