Already, and this is this is the Daily Lot. This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the thirty first of October. I'm Sam Kauzlowski.
Happy Halloween, Happy Halloween.
I'm Billy fit Simons.
I'm Billy Fit Simons.
Earlier this week, the Bureau of Meteorology launched a brand new website. It costs more than four million dollars and was the first major update since twenty thirteen. Within days, the backlash was so intense that the federal government had to step in. On today's podcast, we're going to unpack what went wrong with the bomb redesign, why people reacted so strongly, and what the science tells us about why we hate it so much when familiar things get redesigned.
Okay, Sam, I think we should start with why the bomb. I believe we are allowed to call it the bomb.
We we're good.
I think we'll get into but I think we should start with why they thought that they needed a rebrand. So my understanding is that this website was first launched on October twenty second. What was the reasoning behind the new website?
So they haven't updated the website since twenty thirteen, so it has been a long time, especially in digital terms, twelve years is a very long time. They wanted something modern that worked better on mobile devices. I mean, think about how many screen sizes there were in twenty thirteen. There's so many more now. And the website sees massive traffic. So on any normal day, the bomb is visited by about one point eight million Australians.
Wow, that's a lot.
It's a serious I mean, quick maths, it's probably about one in thirteen Australians are looking at the bomb. On a standard day, when there's severe weather, that jumps to about five point seven million people, which is then about kind of one in four. So this is really critical infrastructure. And so they spent four million dollars on this website.
Itch was meant to be a full redesign that involved a twelvemonth beta testing period, which is when you kind of give the website to users see how they interact with it. And they said that the feedback on the website through that testing was overwhelmingly positive.
And so we're just talking about the website here. The rebrand was just to do with the website.
Yeah, but you have to remember as we do as young people especially, we are visiting websites on mobile more than ever before, So it's really important to remember that where people are engaging with this kind of thing is mostly in the palm of their hand.
Got it okay, So they tested it, they invested millions, and then they launched it. How did that launch go?
Well, the timing wasn't in their favor. It's not entirely their fault that they picked a really bad week to launch it weatherwise, but as we get into it, perhaps could have been prevented. So the website launched just as
severe storms we're hitting southeastern Australia. There were one hundred kilometer and our wins in Brisbane that left one hundred thousand homes without power, twenty five thousand regional power adages in Melbourne and Greater Victoria, and people were trying to check the Bomb's website for critical weather updates and they were finding that they couldn't navigate this new design. And
think about that as a moment. It's a moment of stress, and it's a moment where you're going to the Bomb for critical infrastructure information, you're greeted with the new design. It was never really going to end.
Well, and so what were there specific complaints? Was it that they just didn't know exactly how to navigate this in a case of emergency, or were there specific things missing from the website.
I found trying to break down the specific complaints really interesting because it was you're right, Billy, it's more than just I don't like the look of this or they've changed the color. It was about the functionality. And the biggest issue was with radars. So on the old website, you could track where storms were heading and estimate when they would reach your area, and that's really critical, especially for emergency services who might be planning a response. That
feature was gone. Users also know the radar updates were delayed, so you were only seeing updates that were current as of maybe an hour ago, and that meant that storms could hit your area before the website showed that they would. The color scheme had changed, but that's not as significant as something like the color scheme of hale showing up on the radar.
And so you heard this thing about the color of hale that they changed the color of hail from black.
It was black, and it was now showing up in the same way as rain, and so there wasn't as it wasn't as easy to distinguish hail from rain, which might mean the difference between parking your car undercover or not.
And according to Steve Turton, who is a professor of environmental geography at Central Queensland University, even within the first couple of days, farmers in regional Queensland couldn't enter their own GPS coordinates to check the weather for their specific properties, which might be hundreds of kilometers in size, and commercial fishermen were heavily reliant on the radar to decide whether it's safe to go out fishing or not, and they lost that ability as well.
Right, So the issue was beyond just not liking the rebrand.
Yeah, our point of reference at TDA is funk Gate and when we changed our fond and people didn't like it. And as I was investigating the Bomb's week, it struck me how different these two examples were. Yeah, people didn't like the way TDA looked, but TDA itself didn't change. This was about changing functionality.
Okay, I want to talk more about funk Kate because I actually think that there are some similarities there that I want to get to. But first I want to go to you mentioned earlier that the government got involved, which I imagine isn't that rare here because the bomb is government funded. At what point did the government though step in with this?
So we mentioned before it was launched on the twenty second. On the twenty seventh of October, just five days after the launch, was when we first heard from the Environment Minister Murray what He actually arranged a snap meeting with the bomb's acting chief executive to convey the message that the site was quote not fulfilling the expectations of many users,
and he demanded urgent improvements. Then we heard from Energy Minister Chris Bowen and National's leader David little Proud, who said that it actually reflected broader problems at the Bomb. This was an overwhelming government response and also bipartisan, which is important to note.
And how did the bomb respond to all of this criticism, both from the public and from the government.
So Acting CEO Peter Stone issued an apology. He said that the bomb appreciated that it would take time for people to adjust. And that's an interesting wording there, because Stone's response suggested the Bureau thought the complaints were mainly about people needing time to adjust to something new, rather than genuine problems with the designs and the functionality itself. And many users on social media called that gas lighting,
and so the Bomb's problems really did compound. Then with that apology, users were saying, especially on Reddit, this really kind of caught on there. They were saying, we don't need time to adjust, You've removed the features that we need, right.
I have to say, when I first saw this story, I was surprised that we were talking about a bomb rebrand going wrong, because a very similar thing happened just a couple of years ago when they asked the media asked to not call them the Bomb, and then there was so much controversy about that, and that was part of a rebrand.
And that was in twenty twenty two. So a couple of years ago they came out and said, you can't call us the Bomb anymore. We want to be called the Bureau of Meteorology. And they spent two hundred and
twenty thousand dollars on that exercise. They hadn't reserved the Twitter handles they would have needed to change their name, and sure enough, within about forty eight hours, they released a statement saying that the public could actually refer to them however they wanted to, including the BOMB, which I think is how most of us kind of know the agency.
Now we'll get to more about Bomb's rebrand in just a moment, but first here is a quick message from today's sponsor. I guess we should say that, you know, government agencies rebranding isn't something that is unique to the BOMB. That is something that happens across the boards, both for government agencies and for companies like TDA. Again funk Kate comes up again. But it is a usual part and it also is necessary for companies to update their websites and to remain modern.
And it does happen sometimes in really good ways. I mean, you see some legendary brands out there do rebrands that we all forget about six months later, and they worked really well. In government, it does seem to be tricky. I mean, there was one example I was looking at from twenty seventeen where then New South Wales Premier Gladys spiagically and asked every major cultural institution in New South Wales, so Sydney Opera House or Taronga Zoo, the Australian Museum
to all update their logos to the Warata Flower. That cost the government one hundred and sixty thousand dollars to come up with a proposal there never happened because all the institutions as well as the public pushback pretty hard. So it does seem to be particularly tricky for public institutions. And the big undercurrent here as well is this money
that they're spending. It's our money. I mean, this is taxpayer funded rebrands, which is different again to a private company or TDA doing this kind of thing.
As didn't quite cost that much. I didn't cost that much and that's why it didn't go so well exactly, but.
Also didn't create this much angle with something that people needed for critical infrastructure, which is I think why we're talking about it on a news podcast today. But as it stands, the bomb is sticking with the change.
Right, so they are sticking with it. Have experts said anything about what they could have done? Differently?
Experts love a bit of commentary around this sort of moment and use it to create an example for what you shouldn't do, and there's been a heap of commentary this week. The key themes here really have been about the timing, the user testing angle, and agility. So firstly on timing, launching a major website redesign as a weather agency at the beginning of a spring storm season and amid heat waves is a bold move. In response, BOMB
meteorologists Angus Heinz defended the timing. He said, it's a rare day where we don't have severe weather somewhere in Australia. I think he's got a point there, But experts say they could have done then a gradual rollout and given
users more notice of the change. Steve Turden from Central Queensland University, the expert I referenced before, said when a public service implements major modifications, it is crucial for regular users to comprehend these changes and access the information they require. In this instance, the bureau faulted.
Okay, so they picked the wrong time. But the other two reasons that you mentioned were testing and agility, so take us through those.
So this inadequate user testing point is interesting because the BOMB says that they did test, that they did twelve months of testing. But we can see from the last week if professional meteorologists, farmers and emergency services are all highlighting serious concerns, then it would probably be fair to say there were problems in the testing methods themselves. And then finally, this point around agility is the idea of how should the BOMB now respond to criticism that we've
seen over the past few days. One analyst said, it is not clear to us why the app redesign was rolled out broadly, and we are even less clear on why it hasn't been more aggressively.
Rolled back already interesting.
Which is fascinating. And I think what we learned obviously through our rebrand and perhaps what we're seeing playing out with the Bomb now is any rebrand, government agency or private company probably needs a contingency plan of what to do if it's not received in the right way.
For anyone listening who isn't aware of our rebrand, I know that we have referenced it a few times. But about a year ago, two years ago, two years ago, TDA launched a rebrand and it just went absolutely all fully. The audience did not like the new font that we chose for that rebrand, and they.
Liked everything else. They liked colors, the new logo, the new kind of vibe. The font was the sticking point. Yes.
I actually was listening to another podcast talk about this Bomb rebrand and they were saying, imagine your rebrand going so badly that the government pulls you aside and says not great. Yeah, And they were like, can't relate, and I was like, oh, look, we can't quite relate. But the Victorian premiere was commenting on our post saying this is an awful font, please change it. And I think at the point that you do have politicians getting involved,
you probably know something's not great. But what's interesting is that we did go back to.
Our original scene in terms of the agility point. We can pat ourselves on the back for that we were agile and we actually switched it back. It will be interesting to see if the Bomb does that as well. I wanted to end though Billy with just this one key idea around change, because I think that we instead of getting just stuck in the detail of this, it's cool to think about the way that our brains work.
And there's this basic idea called loss of version, and loss of version is by this Nobel Prize winner Daniel Cannerman. He says that we feel worse about losing something than we do about gaining something, even if they're of the same value. So if I take a dollar off you but give you a dollar, you feel a bit worse about the fact that I took that dollar off you. And so people typically weigh losses with products, apps, websites, services about twice as heavily as gains, and so BOMB
users have lost stuff. They've lost familiar navigation, they've lost the ability to track a storm, even the way that our thumbs move. We've lost that muscle memory of knowing where to go. So even though we've gained a clearer, more modern app interface, the losses are mattering more on a purely psychological level. And that's why the bureau's response
emphasizing that the same information was still available. Perhaps that's why it felt a bit flash and it did create more of a storm or the bomb that they're still not out of.
Wow, it's so interesting learning the psychology behind it, and I can relate. I mean something like Instagram, which has changed so much over the past fifteen years since it first launched, and I feel like every single time they change it. There is controversy about not necessarily rebrand but the changes and users are always first saying we hate that, and then it just becomes normal again. And then when they change it back or change other things once again,
there's controversy. It is a thing that you just don't like change, but then you look back at how it looked ten years ago and you go, oh, that sucked. Of course it needed to change.
And just because there's a psychological concept behind why we don't like something doesn't necessarily mean that's okay. I mean we're also we can easily explain our fear of the other and our fear of the unknown. That doesn't make it something that we should be proud of. So I found that loss of version concept interesting because it's clearly explainable why something like a bomb redesign doesn't go down well.
Whether we should all be pushing through and finding new ways around the app, whether that's a reflection on how inflexible we are as users, is probably another conversation better for psychologists, But at the end of the day, I think the key point here is around that critical infrastructure and easily accessing weather information when you need it most is different to browsing on the shopping app or a social media platform.
A very interesting conversation, Thanks especially for our Friday, which is also Halloween. As I mentioned, Happy Halloween, Happy Halloween. Thank you so much for explaining it. Thanks Billy, and thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Daily Os. We will be back this afternoon with your evening headlines, but until then, have a great day. My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda
Bunjelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigl Country. The Daily Os acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.