I don’t like it, it’s another exercise in taking a functional website and ‘modernising’ it by making it look like a mobile app (i.e. the make it look attractive to kindergarten kids school of design).
For my own use cases it’s made it more annoying to get to the 7 day Canberra forecast, made the local radar harder to see, and I’m not noticing a link to the written ACT region forecast which I will want to look at in winter.
I personally like it. I wish it were a little more compact, but it seems to be nearly feature parable with the old one and looks a little more up to date. This seems to be a step up in accessibility, both in terms of screen reader compatibility and behaving more in line with what an average user would expect. They’ve apparently even gone the extra mile to ensure existing bookmarks keep working.
Having been behind a couple of these modernization efforts, no one ever likes them. People complain every time but the user testing doesn’t lie. Unfortunately redesigns are necessary as technology and user expectations change and considering the fact that the old website didn’t play well on mobile and was well over 10 years old (15 if you’re counting from the last major redesign) I’d say this one was pretty due. The fact this redesign even kept nearly every feature and option (as far as I can tell), rolled out fairly smoothly, and hasn’t gone too overboard with minimalism/lack of character, I’m willing to call the redesign good.
The people who complain about everything complain every time. Most see the new website, think “cool” or “where did everything go?” and get on with their lives. Places like reddit and Lemmy are disproportionately filled with complainers, because most people don’t care enough to get online and moan about every little thing in life. They are actually out in the world doing and enjoying things. This is why every single live service game subreddit is full of 24/7 whining from the same people. The majority of the playerbase is happily playing the game while these people are crying on social media.
Why is it due? What was wrong with the old one?
What does screen reader compatibility even mean? Whose screen? Mine? I use a lap top.
Who cares what the average user expects, it’s up to the smart people to set the standard, not the other way around.
Screen reader. Like for blind people. Who need the screen read out to them. Verbally. By software. Whom the government should be considering while building digital services. See previous mention about “usability issues”.
I’m glad you consider yourself among the smart people. I haven’t worked with the designers on this particular project, but like most I’ve worked with before I would assume they’re also reasonably intelligent. They’ll understand, just like I’m sure you do, that a good interface is an intuitive one. We all have mental models of how we expect software to “feel”; how it should navigate, be structured, and just behave in general. Any time you break that model, you add friction as the user has to learn how your specific app behaves. Of course, there are sometimes good reasons to do so, but I would argue that the weather, which is generally considered a basic task, is not one of them. Therefore, updating their website to match common, modern, and well reasoned design patterns to make it more accessible to new users is reasonably justified.
That said, existing users of BoM already have a mental model of the website, and by updating it they’re breaking it. They’re essentially privileging the experience of new users and they should be careful to ensure the redesign is actually necessary. This is a trade off of all redesigns but, considering my previously mentioned issues with the old website, and their clear effort to maintain feature parity, I would argue that that is fair in this case.