Not a user of this site but a lesson for all techies about changing something which is heavily in use. Don't expect people to take to it immediately and provide some way to allow people to gradually transition.
The site itself looks clean and loads fast but people are complaining that they can't easily find information they used to be able to.
>It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion.
Or rather, it's you and your neighbours deciding to fix your house because it's an eyesore, but then you build a huge unpractical mansion for yourself on their expense.
In South Australia an algal bloom started in ~mid-March of this year, it's a pretty big ecological disaster, probably the worst non-bushfire disaster in living memory. Probably 30% of SA's coastline is affected. It's a pretty big deal affecting many people's livelihoods.
The joint state and federal government relief and cleanup package is worth AUD $102.5 million dollars.
I hope the public receives that comparison at every opportunity.
The old website was frankly excellent, the only problem was it didn't have HTTPS support. I would have happily upgraded that part of the system for the cost of a cup of coffee if I'd had an opportunity to submit for the tender!
The new website is significantly more difficult to navigate (for me, a seasoned tech user). The primary thing Dad's everywhere use it for (the weather radar) now requires scrolling to the _bottom_ of the page, and zooming in from the 'map of Australia' to the region you live in. It used to be like, a click to go from home page -> state weather radar with all the info you needed.
> [BOM] said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.
Absolutely stupid, even those numbers are outrageous. They say it's part of some 'larger upgrade package', prompted by a cyber attack in 2015.
But politicians over here love to blame cyber attacks when technical blunders happen. We had a census a couple years ago and the website fell over due to 'unprecedented load' or maybe it was a 'DDOS attack'? The news at the time couldn't decide who to blame!
Welp, I hope this gets as much world-wide attention as possible so they can be embarrassed and do better.
I don't understand how those kinds of numbers get accepted, approved and paid! We built a fairly complex web application for a customer. The total cost including design, development, QA, data migration from a legacy platform + independent 3rd party security audit/pentest was less than $0.5M!
Even if I accounted for the additional capacity to serve a nation of users, I can't imagine the cost being more than $5M.
Australians will sit and watch their health system shredded, multinationals running off with trillions in resources and pay zero tax/royalties, our poor quality housing and gridlocked cities rank amoungst the most expensive in the world, but will not tolerate anybody fucking with BOM.
If they hired 3 full time devs at 100k salary each to develop and maintain their website, it would take over 300 years to spend that much money... also unrelated but kind of related - australia spent i think it was over 300 billion for some subs that we'll never get. hot news, if you want free money from people who have no clue, go get it from australia! we are indeed a nation of stupid
So according to this article [1] the hundred million is for the renewal of the whole infrastructure including the supercomputer calculating the weather model. If this is true the supercomputer alone costs at least $10 - 20 million. This would make the cost a whole lot more reasonable.
In the UK the intelligence services spent £120M on an "information sharing platform" (email + intranet), before declaring after 3 years work that "technical challenges" made it impossible and the project was canned.
I think its a bit unfair. Its good that the government spent some money in good old cybersecurity. Maybe 96M is a bit much, but it includes a full rebuild of the system. There should be an audit on where all that money went. Having said that, its quite possible they limited certain query patterns to protect against DDoS attacks. No excuses for messing up a website though. The change should have been gradual with secruity holes being plugged first.
User interface changes are very difficult to do correctly. Or perhaps it might be better to say arduous. The principle you should follow, is no-regressions. Everything that users currently do, should be possible on the new system.
The reason this is hard is because you have to find out how the system is used. The mistake comes from believing the previous system does what it was designed to do, no-more, no-less. To users, the implementation is the design.
If a feature was provided that was not in spec by a developer exercising common sense. reproducing the spec might lose the feature. If the implementation architecture facilitated modes of operation that were not explicit goals, users will use those abilities.
Believing your description of the currently used system accurately represents how it is used causes this. You didn't get what you paid for, you got what was delivered.
I'm not even certain it is possible to fully discover every used aspect of a user interface, but the worst failures come from not even trying to find out, assuming that they know already. I suspect properly finding out what your current system actually does should consume the vast majority of your budget.
If you have an imaginary model of what the system does you will never be able to make a replacement, but people will still assume that their on-paper description is accurate. On paper the new system is clearly better.
> Bom's spokesperson told the BBC it had received about 400,000 items of feedback on the new site, which accounted for less than 1% of the 55 million visits in the past month.
This is a _remarkably_ bad attempt to make the complaints look reduced in comparison to usage. Amazing that any organisation would try this line.
I'm tempted to call this yet another example of enshittification, but I don't think that's right: It's not a money-making platform being squeezed to maximize revenue.
Rather, it seems like a bog-standard example of some product designer trying to impress his vice president with dancing monkeys in the hopes of getting promoted (or at least justifying a large expenditure) during a 15-minute rollout presentation. The guy who signs the checks is the only person who matters, he has a short attention span, and he likes shiny stuff. Therefore we get fiascoes like this.
19 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] threadThe site itself looks clean and loads fast but people are complaining that they can't easily find information they used to be able to.
Also, the price tag is eye watering!
Or rather, it's you and your neighbours deciding to fix your house because it's an eyesore, but then you build a huge unpractical mansion for yourself on their expense.
Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign | 119 points, 80 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033435
The joint state and federal government relief and cleanup package is worth AUD $102.5 million dollars.
I hope the public receives that comparison at every opportunity.
The old website was frankly excellent, the only problem was it didn't have HTTPS support. I would have happily upgraded that part of the system for the cost of a cup of coffee if I'd had an opportunity to submit for the tender!
The new website is significantly more difficult to navigate (for me, a seasoned tech user). The primary thing Dad's everywhere use it for (the weather radar) now requires scrolling to the _bottom_ of the page, and zooming in from the 'map of Australia' to the region you live in. It used to be like, a click to go from home page -> state weather radar with all the info you needed.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...
If you want to read our local news about it.
> [BOM] said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.
Absolutely stupid, even those numbers are outrageous. They say it's part of some 'larger upgrade package', prompted by a cyber attack in 2015.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cybe...
But politicians over here love to blame cyber attacks when technical blunders happen. We had a census a couple years ago and the website fell over due to 'unprecedented load' or maybe it was a 'DDOS attack'? The news at the time couldn't decide who to blame!
Welp, I hope this gets as much world-wide attention as possible so they can be embarrassed and do better.
Even if I accounted for the additional capacity to serve a nation of users, I can't imagine the cost being more than $5M.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-24/bom-website-approved-...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/06/mi5-gchq-co...
They have a whole episode that is exactly this.
The reason this is hard is because you have to find out how the system is used. The mistake comes from believing the previous system does what it was designed to do, no-more, no-less. To users, the implementation is the design.
If a feature was provided that was not in spec by a developer exercising common sense. reproducing the spec might lose the feature. If the implementation architecture facilitated modes of operation that were not explicit goals, users will use those abilities.
Believing your description of the currently used system accurately represents how it is used causes this. You didn't get what you paid for, you got what was delivered.
I'm not even certain it is possible to fully discover every used aspect of a user interface, but the worst failures come from not even trying to find out, assuming that they know already. I suspect properly finding out what your current system actually does should consume the vast majority of your budget.
If you have an imaginary model of what the system does you will never be able to make a replacement, but people will still assume that their on-paper description is accurate. On paper the new system is clearly better.
This is a _remarkably_ bad attempt to make the complaints look reduced in comparison to usage. Amazing that any organisation would try this line.
Rather, it seems like a bog-standard example of some product designer trying to impress his vice president with dancing monkeys in the hopes of getting promoted (or at least justifying a large expenditure) during a 15-minute rollout presentation. The guy who signs the checks is the only person who matters, he has a short attention span, and he likes shiny stuff. Therefore we get fiascoes like this.
A perfect example of the state of IT in Australia.