AOL is finally moving around the pieces of its e-mail service.
(Credit: AOL)
After five years of inattention, in 2011 AOL execs finally began to put some serious resources into the company's e-mail service, AOL Mail. Starting in December of last year, AOL began rolling out a new version of the service to its 24 million users. Today, the news is, the upgrade is complete.
That's right, it took eight months to upgrade the system.
Why?
David Temkin, SVP of mail and mobile, said that redesigning this service was, "kind of playing with fire." AOL e-mail drives "a ton" of traffic to AOL content sites, "from Huffington Post on down," Temkin said. "There's just lots of money and users on the line."
AOL started the upgrade process slowly: 1 percent of users in December got the new product. Then a bump to 2 percent, then 5 percent. At each step, the team looked at usage data and feedback. It was difficult. As everyone who has an online or media product knows well, even with changes for the better, "users get disoriented." Which is another way of saying they complain loudly.
Temkin's team had to learn how to "onboard" users who were already onboard. Since I'm a hip Gmail-using guy who lives in the technological bubble of the West Coast, I had to joke about all the old folks AOL has and how hard it must be to re-educate them on the changes... [Read more]
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