What happened to my beloved MailChimp? The slogan for my formerly-favorite email campaign manager used to be You design. Me deliver. It was brilliant branding. It summed up everything about MailChimp in just four simple words, combined with a beautiful logo. The site design and overall feel complimented this brand perfectly.

What’s the new slogan? Maybe Monkey not look “enterprise” enough. Monkey go corporate. Monkey ugly now.

Poor monkey. What happened to you?

Read on for a review of old monkey, new monkey, and what (I think) went wrong.

Before Monkey Got Snobby

MailChimp has been around since 2001 and has always used the clever monkey mascot as it’s face to world. I loved showing this site to my clients and heralded MailChimp as the epitome of super easy, yet powerful, no-hassle email campaign management. It boldly stood out from it’s stuffy, unimaginative competitors and seemed to say, right from the start, “Hey, listen, this doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly complicated and boring. It can be fun! Let’s go!” And this approach worked. My clients ate it up, they loved it.

The home page was inviting and very intriguing. It really made you want to see what the MailChimp interface was like. If the site’s look and feel was this fun, just imagine how great your account interface would be. It might actually be a pleasure to use. And it was.

Monkey Go Corporate

Around August of 2007, MailChimp decided they didn’t look “serious” enough and the site was redesigned straight into corporate hell, utterly destroying their brand. I held off on writing this post, hoping that if I waited a few months they’d pull out of this nose dive. Maybe they just needed time to shine things up a bit. Well, it’s been four months and the monkey is still ugly.

Obviously there was a murmur of complaints, if not a small uproar, prompting MailChimp to explain this new look in their blog. From the August 27th, 2007 post, MailChimp’s All Grown Up (emphasis is mine):

The most common feedback we ever get from website visitors is something along the lines of, “Are you guys for real? I mean, you’re a real business, right? You can do the same stuff that xyz.com offers, right?” Sigh. The old design was nice, but for some business owners it seemed a bit too happy and easy and “too good to be true.”

What!? It was “too happy and easy”!? What sort of sadists are you marketing to? It get’s better…

And we had lots of web designers and creative agencies who use MailChimp, but told us they’re kind of afraid of telling their clients about us. Monkey business is scary to some people.
So we changed the design to make us look a little more serious (at least on the surface). For fans of the chimp (Frederick von Chimpenheimer is his name) don’t worry. We’re still going to keep things fun.

Right, but you’re hiding that “fun” and easy to use side from your prospective clients, the people that aren’t sold on using you yet. These are the people that need to see it most. Why on earth would you paint over who you really are with a dumbed-down, less imaginative, colder look?

This new website design is kind of like how when your boss walks by, and you put a really serious look on your face until he’s gone. You actually look like you’re getting business done, and not watching YouTube. Kinda like that.

That’s kinda like… stupid.

The monkey was obliterated from the public site (thankfully, he’s still in the internal interface, although that doesn’t do jack to save this new branding train wreck). The site was redesigned, or rather, de-evolved into a perfect clone of the typical “business” web site. It has all of the trademark elements:

• Big masthead, just like everyone else
• “web 2.0″ logo - text, gradients, tiny and in the corner
• Stock photo of some smiling jackass near a computer and wearing the “business casual” uniform, pointless and having nothing to do with the actual content of the site
• On the home page, under the masthead, “buckets” (look that one up in your marketing jargon file) of information, links and just about anything else that could be crammed onto the home page, pretending to be organized into horizontal blocks
• A pile of links at the footer that either have no business being on the home page or belong in the main navigation, not as some afterthought or SEO trickery sneezed onto the bottom of the page

Now MailChimp’s site blends in perfectly with the rest of the crowd, having donned the standard business uniform and thus looking like just another drone in the herd.

Monkey Read Minds, Know Everything (except the obvious)

I can guess how that redesign meeting went, I’ve been in dozens of these myself. There is usually an egotistical CEO, VP or self-proclaimed marketing guru with no design skills or training whatsoever that thinks, thanks to their title, that their opinions are the only ones that really matter. The baseless assumptions are always the same: We need to look more “enterprise”. Let’s make things look more “grown up.” People won’t want to use us if we don’t look [insert adjectives meaning stuffy, unimaginative, cold, gigantic, slow here]. They’re baseless because they’re not grounded in actual research, training or experience.

A user, is a user, is a user. It doesn’t matter if that user is wearing a $4,000 suit and sitting in a corner office on the 30th floor, or working in the basement at 4 a.m. wearing jeans and a t-shirt. They’re both human, using a computer with the same expectations, attention spans and cognitive processes, responding to the same set of stimuli in the same manner. They want the same ease of use and minimal complexity because, in the end, they’re pointing and clicking in exactly the same patterns as everyone else. Don’t assume that you have to look “corporate” in order to get those big clients. It’s a fallacy - “big” clients won’t view or use your site any differently than the little guys. Prior to their de-evolution, I had suggested MailChimp to several very large companies, and several very small businesses. None of the big guys balked at MailChimp and thought it was “too easy” looking, or not to be taken seriously. In fact, they loved it because it wasn’t more of the same old bullshit. Just like the small guys. What do ya know, people are people. Users are users.

Another mistake is pretending to know what your users want without considering for a moment that you are a user as well. What do you want? Think about how you react to the design, without stepping outside of yourself and looking at it from every angle except your own. We tend to reach awfully far in order to guess at how these mythical users (”mythical” because their human nature is falsely assumed to be different from your own) will perceive things and react to them. Don’t say “I think the user would want x…” or “the user will think y…” You are the user. What do you want? How does it make you feel?

Poor Monkey

Maybe MailChimp’s sales numbers have skyrocketed after this de-evolution- I mean, re-design. Maybe this colder, stuffier monkey is pulling in new clients by the truckload… but I highly doubt it. I’ve seen this cycle many times, and it very rarely works as the “enterprise-level” thinkers intend becuase, in the end, they’re just guessing at what their users want… not seeing the forest for the trees.

Overall, it just makes me sad. Once a favorite site of mine, now an ugly clone of other ugly clones. Most companies have to to dress up a proverbial pig - putting their not-so-great product into a great looking suit.  Instead, MailChimp has taken their outstanding product and, well… put it in a gorilla suit.