Avoid Member Backlashes to Change by Fostering Prelashes » Dogster Inc. Company Blog: “Over the years we’ve made all the mistakes you can make in regards to releasing new code that makes existing users unhappy. It’s so easy to do as you’ve convinced yourself the changes are the brave new future and the current code base is garbage, convinced yourself so much that you’ve forgotten to even look at the changes through a member’s eyes. This week we removed a large navigation area from all pages, widened the body area to use the new space and set up our headers, body and footers to handle display and UI iterations much better moving forward. Historically such changes created a huge backlash. They’ve been the same kind of backlashes that happen on Facebook, but fortunately for us don’t getting written up on CNN or TechCrunch. But now our goal is to have prelashes. No one likes change and even changing a button color can lead to a member protest. Since backlash is inevitable, make it a prelash. Let your members/users/customers know as much as possible in advance. Let them see screen shots, let super-users test on development servers, prepare tips and how-to’s on how to deal with the changes in advance and roll them out before the changes go live.”

Great way of working with a positively engaged community to ensure product changes, prelash is funny too.