As of today, our Library has a nice new web site. Last week our IT Services were re-launched.

Thousands of pages have been converted to a new template. New structures have been tested and implemented. New ideas have been included. Lots of consultation and feedback happened. Many stakeholders have pulled together and finally the work can see the light of day as it goes live.

The team doing this project have been working incredibly hard on this over most of the summer. They’ve had many issues to deal with and remarkably they are still standing and still smiling. (Well done to Fran, Sarah, Leon and everyone else for all their hard work.)

So what happens on the day this thing goes live?

Well… lots of people find that their tea bags go splat on the floor.

I shall explain via a quick anecdote. After having lived in our house for three years we realised one day that the kitchen bin was in the wrong place. It was by the back door and not very near to the sink and cooker. So we decided to move it.

In fact we moved it to inside the ‘kitchen triangle‘. That’s the area between your fridge, cooker and sink which is meant to be the optimal zone of efficiency. Placing the bin inside this triangle is a very good design.

The trouble comes the day after this change has been implemented.

7.30am and the kettle goes on. 7.38am and the first cup of tea has finished brewing. Time to remove the tea bag and add the milk. So you take the tea bag out and chuck it in the bin. Only the bin isn’t where it used to be so the tea bag hits the floor.

Tea bag splat.

It doesn’t matter how good the new arrangement is, for the first couple of the weeks the tea bag keeps hitting the floor. Does this mean the new design is bad? No, of course not. It just means that when you’re used to one way of doing things, a different arrangement can take some time to get used to.

Many of the feedback comments about re-launched web sites can be safely filed under ‘tea bag splatters’. However if you’re still getting tea bag splats after a few weeks then you might have a problem…