> Don't bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. I can't think of the last time I encountered a UX change I thought was actually worth it. They're always bothersome, because now I notice the tool--it's no longer an extension of my mind and body, instead all of a sudden it's something getting in the way of my work.
I claim there are two reasons UX changes happen:
(1) Original design was delivered too hastily and was flawed, requiring breaking changes in the field to fix it.
(2) Someone wants to get promoted and thinks the best way to do that is to spin a "UX refresh" as something "successful" rather than the signal of abject failure it actually is. We should stop rewarding this behavior.
The UI is designed for features A, B, and C. We design, test, revise design, test, and so on. There’s more thought and rigor that goes into than you might be thinking.
Hurray, product launches, it looks good, and most importantly it works and users are successfully completing their tasks.
Now what? Well at the company town hall meeting the CEO announces features D, E, and F. Oh, there was a team already working on these features in isolation and the workflow is set in stone because they already built the back-end services and APIs. Ok, now we need to design UI for these features and cram them alongside A, B, and C.
If we were smart we designed the UI in such a way that it can accommodate new stuff, because we always know there’s new stuff coming down the line. It fits, but now the UI is getting a bit bloated.
Now here comes new features G, H, and I. Oh, by the way feature H is similar to E, but it works totally differently. They kind of fill the same role, so we need to make sure users aren’t confused by it. No, we can’t merge them because E is owned by product but H is the CMO’s initiative.
Cram more stuff in. Now it’s starting to get confusing, and the design that made sense for A, B, C, D, E, and F doesn’t really work with I because feature I does something that current user’s don’t really need, it’s meant to grow our market share.
Rinse and repeat until the only thing left to do is nuke it all from orbit and repeat the cycle.
In my experience it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional product culture, not overzealous UX designers. We’d rather not design new UIs for the same product constantly and do “refreshes”, we’d rather be fixing all the unglamorous problems in existing UI that frustrates users or get to the backlog of WCAG violations that no one seems to care about.
I was next to my girlfriend when Chrome updated on her computer. It popped up a page of new features and she goes "I don't need this, I will never use a feature" as she closes it.
Refactoring is generally the most reliable way to improve a system. But rewriting is the best way to get promoted, and do work that feels personally "fun" and "impactful". I suspect this is the decisive factor in a large fraction of UI overhauls
What you're saying is spot on wrt new features in large corporations. That's not what is usually considered to be a "redesign".
Another thing about this is that these designers aren't actually users of the software they're designing. A recent example I stumbled upon the other day is portainer. It was a fantastic web UI back when docker got started, clearly made by people that had an issue and wanted to solve it. It had issues and warts, but it added value overall.
Nowadays it's not really worth using anymore, because none of the developers or designers actually have ever used it to manage anything themselves. It just doesn't actually solve any issues anymore, despite having lots of pointless features and looking more shiny now.
For instance:
"The new UI is better." "This code is better."
However, without clarification, "better" can be subjective and may simply indicate a difference rather than an inherent improvement.
Considering the previous functionality of the UI/code, the new "better" version should demonstrate significant enhancements to be worth considering.
I absolutely hate software that doesn't change the UX. The chance that they got it right on the first try and kept it right as the capabilities grew is exactly zero.
Keeping old UX is nearly always lazy or forced. If you have or hope to have growing userbase let the stuff evolve. Let stuff move to where new users expect to find it. Let it move to places that make sense now. Sure, offer legacy UX for old users that absolutely hate change but don't stifle yourself and your new users.
This could be even not because of some flawed initial design, but due to unrelated technology advancements that are available just now.
I cannot count how many times a major versioning of a large piece of software that was tied in with a UI redesign signaled a massive overturning in positive usability and focus of the authoring company but.... it's been almost every time.
The greatest 'power user' focused engineering programs I formed my career around all had something similar in common: they had a core UI that was brilliant in the way it worked, and stable. New features got added to that base UI as incremental menus, additional icons in workbenches, and every now and then an extra menu or two.
But they didn't go wiping the slate clean and coming up with complete new workflows. They kept it familiar while improving the end-user productivity, and THAT is what kept customers re-upping their licenses year after year after year. Add things for those who already are users. Expand where needed. Don't rock the boat unless really needed... because nearly ever time I've seen that boat rocked the MBA's and 'Designers' doing the rocking are under the impression they are smarter than the people who built the boat in the first place.
Dassault Systèmes has spent a decade recovering from the absolutely asinine decision to revamp the UI of one of the greatest engineering tools of the modern era (CATIA V5), to make the icons glow all cool and be completely blue/gray duotone with one fucking hue and far less functional density, purportedly because someone in their infinite business/designer school wisdom thought it looked more 'modern' and signified 'change', resulting in the absolute backwards fucking step that was CATIA V6. They've been backpedalling ever since, IMO.
If you don't change the UI, nobody notices- and that's usually a good thing....
> the MBA's and 'Designers' doing the rocking are under the impression they are smarter than the people who built the boat in the first place.
Exactly. It's a function of power and incentives. In the organizations we build there are people who have the power to hurt users, and the incentive to exercise that power in a visible way. They aren't intending to hurt users, that's just a by-product. Instead, they're trying to "delight" users, as if the user is some kind of infantile homunculus instead of a thinking person doing important work.
You're quite literally leaving zero room for things improving over time. Either whoever built the software got it exactly right on the first try, or it's an insider political move.
Never mind that products can evolve over time, or that technology can enable new features, or that users can request new things, or that we just get better at building UIs over time.
In some sense, yes. "Improvements" that break my workflow--where before said improvement a sequence of UX interactions produced a result and afterwards the result isn't any longer there or the interactions are no longer possible--aren't worth the price. So I'm all for non-breaking changes, just don't ever change anything in such a way as to break existing users.
> technology can enable new features
Great, so build those new features in such a way that they don't break existing users--i.e. such that I do not notice them.
> we just get better at building UIs over time
Congratulations! I'm happy for you! But I'll be really unhappy if you use me as a guinea pig to test out your newfound abilities.
I mean, I am terribly glad we're done with Windows 95 and Android 4 style UX; aren't you?
I’d agree with the quote, every big UI rework has been controversial, see Windows Vista, Windows 8, and iOS 7. Even at an app level, developers will frequently refresh their UI, usually dropping features and making the software less useful.
By contrast, emacs has improved dramatically from v26, to v27, 28, and now 29. It's gotten faster with things like tree-sitter and native compilation. LSP has been completely revolutionary. You know what hasn't changed? The UX.
Same thing with Android/iOS. The new features don't change the fact that the device is a terrible compromise. It's pretty bad at being a telephone compared to the actual phones which preceded it--for example, try making a phone call without looking at the device. With a physical number pad I used to be able to dial numbers with one thumb while driving, without looking at my phone. Try doing that with your "smart" phone.
It's also terrible at being a computer because it lacks a keyboard and any way to run normal computer programs--everything is these nerfed "apps". Why can't I have a shell, emacs, gcc, etc?
So, I guess no. I'm not glad, really. Neither Windows nor Android made anything fundamentally better for me. And incrementally polishing these turds doesn't either.
(yes i know there was something in between, but let’s not talk about that)
On the flip side, who do get to be promoted.
This appears to be not true for the OS (but only for Apps / websites). I'd say, for personal devices, folks expect a shiny new UI every OS update. For ex: iOS and Android are always in contention for who changes UI the most, from one version to another.
Besides, styling changes and form changes are not the same.
A 99% of folks could not care less, when they're not downright annoyed by the UI changes. There has been major reactions on UI changes (from Office, Gmail Windows, Gnome, iOS and macOS to Facebook). There have been in comparison crickets about the UI not "updating fast enough", and those are mostly from designer types (like the stupid "skeuomorphic" hoopla a decade ago).
A small minority of designers and superficial people is the one making any noise about UI needing to be updated every time.
As long as they aren’t broken or removing large amounts of useful functionality. The only redesign I’ve ever disliked is the Reddit one, and only because it still doesn’t work properly.
Remove all the objectively (from the perspective of a non-oblivious user) stupid stuff that 10 and 11 added including half-baked UIs, extra clicks, inconsistencies, random forced changes, 'AI', etc.
How many of us have encountered 'Legacy' systems that get a bad wrap but are actually responsible for everything?
Eventually Legacy will have a positive connotation. So let's get to that now and resume improving the internals unless there's actually something else to do.
And for those who bring up being afraid of change I propose Windows Random Change edition for you.
You’ll be happy to hear there’s an easier way of saying this! It’s “subjectively”
If you need a shorthand you could also go with “IMO”.
They understandably emphasized stability over replacing tested components, which financial is often known for. However I think their visible sign of improvement to the customer is severely lacking even today (this was five years ago), especially compared to their competitors. My overall feel is that the site is brittle regardless of what's happening under the hood.
This breaks my historic workflow of keeping an unsaved notepad open so that if it was detected it wouldn't force close other processes with unsaved work and I could save them or rely on my PC to stay awake and running some long-running process overnight.
The first time I woke up to a restarted PC with my place lost bc of this, I realized that Windows' days were numbered on my hardware.
The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.
Notepad2 is an amazing drop-in replacement with a perfect balance between features and simplicity. That’s what Notepad should have been since forever. Microsoft should buy it and study how to make basic apps.
Last time I’ve used notepad it still couldn’t tab things. When it’s so bad, there’s no chance I will “notice” anything later. You lost a user of a free mandatory default app, congrats.
