Last week, we wrote about the virtual user rebellion over at social organization site Meetup. The site had unleashed a drastic redesign that many users said they never saw coming and these selfsame users came out in droves to complain in the site’s feedback forum. In less than 24 hours, nearly 4,000 users came out to vote that the site “give organizers the ability to restore the old format.”
While the company hasn’t completely rolled back the redesign, it has come out with a blog post explaining the changes, apologizing and vowing to fix them.
One of the big comlaints, as RWW alum Adrianne Jeffries notes on The New York Observer, was that the redesign messed with the existing hierarchy on the site. “Some of the changes made organizers feel like Meetup had taken some of the control over the groups they had carefully cultivated, sometimes for years,” explains Jeffries.
CTO Greg Whalin addresses this idea directly, saying that “We in no way set out to indicate that we are devaluing Organizers. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. […] I completely recognize that in some cases, we made mistakes that may have made it feel like this wasn’t the case. For that I apologize.”
According to Whalin, the site has already rolled back a number of changes over recent days. Some, he makes frank admissions about, saying that the change should never have been made. “These should never have been removed, and honestly, it was a bit of an oversight that they disappeared,” Whalin writes in regards to user roles and titles on the RSVP list.
For the full list of changes, you can read Whalin’s post, but we wonder – will they be enough? Can you really fault a company if they listen to user feedback and respond?
