Tuesday, October 13, 2009

You Sure Got a Purty Website!

I have had days where I'll hit the USPTO site as much as fifteen or twenty times. I use it for a host of reasons: I do the obvious applications and other filings; I research potential clients; I do very preliminary (quick-n-dirty) trademark clearances; I look up filings by opposing counsel to get a feel for them; all sorts of stuff.

The site's always been useful. But a little clunky-looking. Especially once you got to the inside pages. Nothing horrible, just clunky.

So it was a nice surprise to get to the page this morning after the long weekend and see that it had a new look and some attempts, at least, at improved functionality. (Launch announcement.)

On preliminary review, it seems a bit slicker, and the initial navigation is a little bit more accessible. It's a little disappointing to see that many of the inside pages that I looked at were essentially unchanged in style or substance, but there's only so much you can expect at one time, I guess.

But it's more a set of changes that will affect the first time visitor's experience, or the occasional user. For the hardcore types... even the stuff that was hard to find, we had already gone and found it and could always find our way back. For users like me, the changes just impose a brief learning curve for anything that's newly positioned.

But it is pretty. Prettier, anyway.

Now what would be really cool is if they brought back direct linking to TESS records.

--B
been overhauled

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