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The Bureau of Meteorology has been ordered to make changes to its new website after facing criticism from farmers and politicians over missing or hard-to-find features on the new-look site.
Is it a ticking timebomb or all a storm in a teacup?
When Facebook made changes to its news feed over the years, it faced complaints, campaigns and petitions from users to bring back the old design.
Rarely, if ever, did Facebook change back and users adjusted or moved on.
Many an institution, including recently the ABC, has weathered criticism of a website redesign before people get used to it.
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More than a year since the ABC website upgrade, it remains the top-visited news site in the country.
It’s not fair to compare a critical service such as weather reporting to news or social media, but the BoM will likely be hoping its fate will be the same after launching its new website one week ago to a flurry of online – and political – anger.
One ABC audience member in complaining about the new site said that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The BoM has argued, however, it was broken.
The old website, last upgraded when Kevin Rudd was prime minister the first time, is “beloved” according to BoM officials.
But the agency has been working since 2019 to develop the new site at a cost of $4.1m for a reason.
The upgrade was needed after a “serious cyber intrusion” on the BoM’s site in 2015 revealed a range of vulnerabilities in the BoM’s systems.
The new site has been built from the ground up and upgraded to meet modern expectations such as accessibility and being mobile friendly, the BoM said.
The new site had been in beta testing for 16 months, with users able to access the website themselves if they knew where to find it.
The BoM has said the feedback received through this process was fed into the site before the official launch.
The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, has suggested that farmers should have been consulted in this stage. The National Farmers’ Federation declined to comment when asked about it.
Some of the criticism is that the agency didn’t do randomised testing on people visiting the site.
This probably would have led to more complaints about a confusing experience for people just trying to get the weather.
The other complaint seems to be around the timing of the launch, when there was severe weather along parts of the south-east of Australia.
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The timing of any launch would be tricky in a country where increasingly dangerous and destructive weather systems are occurring amid a rapidly changing climate.
A week since the launch, the BoM has said it has received “a lot of feedback” on the design, which has now been aired in federal parliament and by the Queensland premier.
Littleproud said locals were saying a major issue was not being able to enter GPS coordinates for their property – with searches restricted to towns or postcodes.
One of his local residents also complained about not being able to see heavy rain levels measured on his property location, which he described as “very complicated and very stressful”.
The BoM was asked about the concerns raised by Littleproud but the bureau did not respond by the time of publication.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the BoM acting chief executive, Dr Peter Stone, apologised for the issues with the site and, in regards to the radar on the new site, said it “provides one view of the current weather situation”.
“It is not intended to replicate or replace the bureau’s weather warnings, which are created by our expert meteorologists and issued ahead of a severe weather event,” he said.
The agency has highlighted it has been in this position before. When the BoM’s weather app relaunched in 2020, it arrived with a dip in user satisfaction but it has since returned to previous levels.
Even so, the federal environment minister, Murray Watt, has ordered changes be made.
For now, users unhappy with the change can still access the old site, which has been moved here. There are some features of the old site that aren’t yet on the new one and the BoM has said those will be transitioned while the old site remains available.
Until then, the BoM is welcoming feedback. Stone said the BoM will act quickly and there will be more improvements in the coming weeks.
With 2.6bn visits to the BoM’s site every year, there will likely be a lot of feedback.
