This morning the USPTO launched a revamped version of its website, www.uspto.gov. They'd had a beta version up for a month or so, but when I took a look at it I found that fewer than 60 people had actually commented on the new-look site, and the site as launched doesn't appear to have taken into account the comments left on the beta site.
I haven't done a full exploration of the new site yet, but from the home page it looks like some things will be easier to find. For example, there's a drop-down "quick links" menu right near the top of the home page that includes links to PAIR, EFS and EPAS and the MPEP, as well as the forms page and the patent/patent application databases. These are frequently used pages, and it used to take some clicking (or some bookmarking) to get to EPAS, for example, so this new feature is pretty convenient. The PTO tweaked the PAIR interface a few weeks ago - not to the better, to my taste - but it looks pretty much the same as it always did. The patent search page is now slightly different, landing you on what used to be the "quick search" page, but you still have the choice of searching by patent number or using the "advanced search" option.
Most of the older pages I've looked at still have the same look as the old version. And that's a good thing, because the single most noticeable change for me was the poor - REALLY POOR - choice of colors on the home page, which is now also present on the patent forms page, the how to contact OED page (but not the OED page itself, which curiously links to a different, old-looking how to contact OED page), and many other pages. They went with a gray/light blue/white color scheme, but light blue or gray letters on white are difficult to see (even if one enlarges the letters):
What gets me is that they received negative feedback about the font colors and sizes at least 12 days ago and did nothing about it.
The other thing I've noticed thus far is that the search engine is poor. Really poor. Inexcusably poor, as in "Throw-it-from-the-one-instead-of-handing-it-to-Marshawn-Lynch-what-were-they-thinking?" poor. For example, one of the comments complained about the apparent disappearance of the attorney and agent roster. So I typed in "attorney roster" in the search box and got back the following:
Huh? I get the same thing when I type in "agent roster". If I type in "Office of Enrollment and Discipline" (which I only type in knowing from the past that the list of practitioners is found there, I'd have been clueless if this was my first time on the site), the OED's page is...the sixth result listed:
What on earth is the matter with the search engine? Perhaps the fact that it's still a beta site - see the upper right corner of the screen shot above - has something to do with it. But it's still inexcusable. Perhaps some day we'll learn why the USPTO didn't just cut a deal with Google to power its search engine; it shouldn't be hard to do with an ex-Googler (some would say a still-Googler) at the helm.
Subscribers to Carl Oppedahl's usenet lists mentioned a number of other desirable changes to the USPTO's web site, which we may blog about on a different occasion. In the meantime, this roll-out of the new site, while offering a few nice features, on the whole seems to have hit the ground with a thud.