My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to 'keep the team busy'.
Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the "maintenance surface" becomes bigger and bigger.
What should happen of course is that the product's feature set is frozen at the "peak version", and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that's a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and "software as a service" which they like so much. From the customer's point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don't add any value, right?
Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the 'average customer' (which doesn't exist btw) isn't pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.
Subscription model is actually way better if you don't want to end up with feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever fix bugs and improve performance.
If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.
Microsoft Word 5.1 on the Macintosh was published in 1992 and was generally seen as the best word processor ever invented. It's UI was perfect. It won a lot of praise in the press, all of it deserved. Sadly, after version 5.1, Microsoft began to focus on the integration of the Office Suite, which meant re-doing all the apps so that they'd be open to programming. And more features got added, and the UI became cluttered. For those of us who sometimes use Word, but don't need the rest of Office, Word 5.1 remains the high point.
Also, as others often said, 5.0 seemed like a broken release, and the ".1" was a much bigger upgrade than is normally implied by a non-major-version number. So it is version 5.1, and not version 5.0, that is remembered fondly.
I completely agree and to me this is the "Flash Bones" problem.
Despite one's opinion of Flash as a web alternative or its license, it was a great way to run interactive content on a browser, and they kept adding features to their native IDE ("Flash" itself) and capabilities to the player (including the SWF spec).
It eventually reached a point where there was not much more to add to it: it could play video (novel at the time) and audio (including live synthesis), use sockets, etc etc, and do some pretty advanced stuff supported by the player/spec. But none of that sold Flash IDE licenses, so they _had_ to add more features to the IDE. One of these features was the ability to do Bones, a pretty common animation feature.
To me that's what marked the IDE decline. I used to create a lot of Flash content, but stopped using it at that point too. Not because of bones, but it was symbolic of the moment. I still created Flash apps for years, but it was always by creating fresh, "stage-less" projects, compiled from source code (the right way to go anyway).
Bones itself is a great feature, but at the time Flash the IDE was already way behind other animation tools that exported to Flash like ToonBoom. Adding that feature just made it clear that they didn't know what direction to go with the IDE: it wasn't the best animation tool (despite having kickstarted a market!), it wasn't the best dev tool, just a bit of both with very few people who needed both. No surprise it stopped selling even while the platform was thriving online, circa 2010.
This commment and the OP seem to suggest that if users were in control, they would not change things. They would not add features. They would subscribe to the idea that software is "finished" (save for bug fixes).
Can we agree that, realistically, generally users are not in control of the software development process, despite any organisational structures that appear to let users drive it.
FL Studio is a long-standing, and much loved software package for audio production.
Since its beginning FL Studio has had the following policy: Once you buy the software, all updates are free for life.
The counterpoint is that each new version of the software has gotten better and better. Therefore, the purchase of FL Studio license both has fantastic current and future value, and has earned intense customer loyalty and online reputation, generating substantial word-of-mouth sales---like what I am doing right here, right now.
That definitely happens, but I think a lot of the blunders are due to good intentions with poor execution or not enough thought into the need and demand.
Things like adding features to solve a problem, when those problems only affect a small percentage of users, is something I see a lot. Especially in the beginning of a product when you’re not 100% sure what you’re making or who you’re making it for and you want to appease all of your customers so you don’t lose them.
Or the feature added is too complex to be useful for a user without training / tutorials, of which few users will undertake that time investment.
I have yet to be on a team where features were not trying to directly address a customer issue / complaint, but maybe I’ve been lucky.
Keeping bean counters shouldn’t be the goal, but everyone does like to keep eating. What do you suggest for keeping the business healthy while not making things terrible?
Beginning: Slow and almost no return. Slow being a lot of intellectual effort to lay the foundation. No return being the foundation does not do anything useful, yet.
Middle: Fast and linear return. Building on a sound foundation allow adding feature that is simple and with high quality; and the return is linear to the effort.
End-of-life: Slow and almost no return. Bloated software eventually is dragged down by historical burden (tech debt, legacy features, etc.). Massive effort is needed to add feature, and the return is almost painful to stand.
A lot of recent software took the approach of forced update to extend the middle life. Like the chrome today is considerably different thing than its beginning. Py3 tries to demolish its historical legacy, and embrace new foundations.
I was thinking something like that when changing some settings in Visual Studio Code this week-end. Before version x it was just a json file, now there's a GUI that wraps up that json file in a bunch of drop-down menus. I have like 5 settings in the file but the menus make it look like I am playing flight simulator or something. Thankfully I saw the curly brackets button and I can still edit the file manually :).
> Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the "maintenance surface" becomes bigger and bigger
I side with you 100% on that
The meme about software being an act of non-stop bicycle reinvention has never been more true to life than it is now
One might argue that some SaaS product teams hold back adding new features almost to a fault. Basecamp and Sifter come to mind.
Edit: I know more about Sifter than Basecamp. I login to Basecamp every few years and it seems like not too much has changed to my untrained eye, but maybe they did stuff under the hood. For sure I know that Sifter got to what they considered peak features and stopped.
It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively.
Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they don't really care. People originally balked at the reactions feature, calling it gauche and unnecessary - but now people use it as part of the language of the platform without a second thought.
Compare with Twitter. Every UI "overhaul" they've ever done has been received in a hugely negative way. The only change which has been remotely successful was the 140/280 switch.
The difference is threefold:
First, Twitter's UI changes have been big. They skip over incremental changes and go straight for gigantic overhauls. This requires people re-learn the language of the site completely every couple of years.
Second, these changes have invariably been coupled with user-hostile design decisions. The obvious one this time round is the automatic switching to "AI sorted timeline" on every visit. No wonder people have an almost pavlovian response to the design changes.
And thirdly, while Facebook's changes are usually to accommodate changing usage patterns, new features, or new hardware, Twitter's updates are very transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience for any sector of the market. Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place.
Gosh I didn't expect this to be such a long rant. Turns out I have a lot to say about the terrible design decisions made over in Twitter land. The conclusion is this: people don't hate change. They hate change which makes their lives worse than the status quo would have done. It's not complicated.
My wife has handicaps (deaf and cerebral palsy). She gets nervous and mistrustful if something has changed. She hates updates and asked me why the companies can't let the software alone.
She has a point. Updates and nagging dialogs have a cost which is higher for non-IT people. Imagine your old neighbor being confused if he should allow that update or not and being stressed about because these update requests don't stop coming in.
The best analogy of finished software I have heard is this:
> Software is done, like mowing the lawn is done.
We live in an imperfect world, if we want to keep ourselves safe and prevent bad actors out of our data/technology. Updates are a part of the process. You don't mow your lawn once, it has to be maintained. Which is the same as software.
This is something that we would be all better for if we could teach this concept to everybody so that updates are just a normal part of life.
Two related stories. At one point way back in the day, eBay wanted to change the background color of the main page from yellow to white. They didn't just make the change one day, instead they slowly changed the hex code every couple of days so the change was gradual. When it was complete, some people would say stuff like, "Hey, didn't the background used to be yellow, when did that change?".
When I worked at reddit I told this story, and we ended up using the same technique to move from a two line display to a three line display. Each day we slight changed the spacing to make it larger, until we had enough room for the three lines, and then we switched to three lines. Some people even responded to people's complaints by saying, "but it doesn't take up any more space than the old two line display!". Of course this was reddit, and at the time the code was totally open source, so someone found the daily checkins to change the spacing and outed us, forcing us to put the "compress the link display" checkbox into the preferences, which is still there to this day.
Wow. From where I'm sitting it seems like Reddit went to the ends of the earth to make users happy during periods of change, and wound up with a prevailingly negative reputation (in its own community) for its efforts. Was that the impression internally as well?
You know, a lot of users would be more ok with change if it was demoed to them first, or given a heads-up, or they were given an opportunity to give feedback that co's actually use, and improve the product. A lot of people I know would say something to the effect of, "[Google/Microsoft/Apple/other co] can fly me out and have me test every product. I'll do it for free." Just because the practice of forced system updates and breaking changes is so god damn frustrating and it happens so often.
Back when I worked in medical software, it fucked up doctors' and nurses' workflow very, very badly for a whole workday (could be anywhere from 8-24+ hours), and it might stay the same way for years. Because even if they tell us to revert it, it's so low on our priority list that it just stays there forever. Users can complain forever and nothing will change because we refuse to prioritize the very thing they're asking for.
Tech co's don't really have a satisfying answer to this issue IMO. The most we do is bring in a few people off the street every few months to test the whole system, but usually we seem to just say "LG2M" when another engineer on the team says it should be fine. That's an engineer, not a user. You won't get quality feedback.
I guess when you keep telling new engineers some dark shit like, "Users don't know what they want", your industry will get pretty callous to its customer base.
Every time they change something in Windows, they never take the old thing away but instead keep both. Which means there's a myriad of ways to get to the control panel. And there's multiple variants of the control panel UI...
Outlook is another good example, there's 3 different UI's where we can add/remove accounts.
Result: New users use the new (default) UI, old users use the old UI, admins use what's quickest.
The real kick in the beans from MS is the new UI lacks anything beyond basic functionality in the new UI.
For example, Win10 (1803) Mouse settings you can modify:
Left/Right handed,
Scroll Wheel lines,
Scroll inactive windows when you hover.
For every other change you have to click "Additional mouse options" and are taken to the old UI.
MS Win10, and to a lesser extent Server 2016-19 has increased the number of clicks it takes me to get to the thing dramatically.
In 7 I relied heavily on the search feature - it was wonderful to type "Programs and" hit enter and get to the page I want. Today they have hidden (in win10) those old UI screens.
It is frustrating.
I would accept the new UI if it had feature parity, but it can't even perform the most basic tasks (mouse pointer speed for example).
Agreed. The end result may be that Windows 8 and 10 are inconsistent UI-wise, but it's also the only reason I'm not really angry at them - because I know that if I can't do something in the new, dumb, infantilized UI, I can always do it in the traditional, pre-Windows 8 UI.
I've seen many UI rollouts that carefully track user happiness metrics. All UI changes have in common that user happiness goes down for a short time after the change -- but for good changes, it goes back up and to an even higher level than before. So it's expected that right after a change people are unhappy, which is where Nielsen's (sensible) suggestion comes from.
The problem is of course that UX designers get so used to dismissing that initial criticism that they sometimes dismiss valid criticism that leads to long-term user unhappiness as well.
This is just curmudgeonliness backed by nothing at all.
You probably shouldn't do major redesigns with no real benefit to the user (I'm looking at you, reddit), but if you're adding or improving functionality, then feel free to incrementally improve your site constantly. People will get used to constant small improvements and will miss them if they stop.
Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy.
Firstly: humans don't resist change when it's something that they asked for, they resist things being imposed upon them against their will. There is an incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that "we know best", this is a very parent-child style relationship: "Mother knows best", that both disempowers and disengages customers.
Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times Yes!
Here's the right way to do a UI revamp: Introduce your powerful, better, shiny new UI as a clone of the old UI. Once the clone is of high fidelity, then introduce the ability to switch to new "skins" or new "modes" which have the new powerful features, or the better UX. Perhaps even set up a scenario with 2 or more competing to win new users.
The proper way is to let users discover and move to the new thing. Imposing new UI/UX on users just degrades goodwill, and it also hides data about where the new version has flaws or needs improvement. Adopting change needs to be a "pull" and not a "push."
At Google years ago, the UX designers coined the term "change aversion" and used it in exactly this arrogant way that this article is talking about. They even used this concept to dismiss the empirical results of UX experiments that they themselves conducted with regular users, that indicated this effect. Lol how do I science?
This resulted in lots of internal memes mocking these UX designers.
Totally agree with everything this article says, fuck arrogant UX designers coming into my office and rearranging my workspace, fuck you coming into my house and rearranging my furniture.
(If you attempt to justify this by "it's not your product it's the company's", you are really missing the point, and you shouldn't be a UX designer. Human emotions don't care about legal structures.)
I agree 100%. In my view every change you make to your software (that is not a bug fix) is just as likley to reduce the perceived value for your current customers as to increase it. Spread these changes over time and you segment the customer base across different states of pleased and unhappy. Naturally as the customer base denormalizes against any given state affinity you reduce the overall population's feelings about your app.
IMHO this is one of the hardest problems to solve with long lived applications. What changes can be made, what features can be added or changed and what "look and feel" changes can be made without tilting the affinity of the current users vs expanding the value proposition for new ones.
> The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off that I'll move, no matter what the cost.
This is why I gave up my iPhone X. I just hated constantly re-learning Apple's new paradigm du-jour, and I absolutely loathed FaceID and the notch.
Now I have a OnePlus 7 Pro, with "Touch ID" and no notch, and except for some friends occasionally saying "why are you not blue" I am happy as a clam. I never want a "Face ID" and I never want a "notch." (I don't care about bezels, etc.)
Now, I'm considering dropping the rest of Apple from my life, after a 15 year Apple-only lifestyle. It's really the "touch bar," when all I really want is an ESC key and real F keys, and the fact that I have to repair my laptop every six months because some key or other is broken again. And, it's not even a "wait 20 minutes while we replace the keyboard" but more of a "wait a few days to a week" and god hope they don't charge you $700. Ridiculous.
Getting rid of F keyboard is a major fuckup from Apple. I am very far of suggesting that they don't know what they do, but I am yet to see a software developer happy with the Touch Bar - after all these years.
People don't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them are lazy, and don't want to change their habits, no matter how bad they are.
I know from my experience, that most valuable users will contact you directly (e-mail, support, twitter, other way) to describe their experiences before and after the change, telling you what exactly hurts them.
Rest of them are pointless trolls with "First Comment Rule". What is that? First negative comment will spark negative discussion, so trolls spark them to pressure on company/product. There is a lot of companies that will write, "I am sorry", and will start to move backwards because of that.
How to live with that? Listen, adapt, yet don't care about everything or everyone. :)
Adobe should read this and understand it. Veteran users of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign get updates that change the default way of doing something and they don’t even provide a UI to change back. Don’t fix long-standing bugs, just change something that didn’t need changing.
That and the major performance downgrades to support unwanted features.
I love how the author shouts from the rooftops the following
>This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric (...)
While this whole post reeks with entitlement and egocentrism - but from his perspective, so that is OK!
To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger user base than himself and only thinks about his benefit and how the changes affect him and how he uses the product.
>Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the vague and nebulous future.
This is simply not true. Depending on what you buy (a physical product like a bike) or a software subscription (like photoshop), you get those upgrades whether you want it or not. You don't want it? Then DONT BUY THE PRODUCT. Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don't like it? You go to the freaking competitor!
I understand the authors frustrations but customers have the ultimate final say in anything by voting with their wallet.
Upgrading from v1 to v2 of your product is no different than migrating from your product to your competitor's product, except you probably have better compatibility. If your competitors offer good-enough compatibility, or you break backwards compatibility, even this advantage is lost.
Just as with data structures, we should build software itself as generally immutable. The successor to version X, in most cases, is version Y of something else. The exception seems to be filling out features. If your v1 is good but sparse, then adding missing features is an obvious win for users, too. That means, though, that you need to publish your roadmap. Customers can't plan around arbitrary releases and mystery features.
This article is correct, but you can take it to a higher level of abstraction.
All change is interpreted by how it impacts the individual. The article laid out one possible scenario where this results in bad will. But it is broader than that. It is broader than product design. If you look at the people in your world, and think about how they will react to a change, you'll get a picture of how a change will come across, whether that is a product change, a process change, an organizational change, etc.
At the end of it all, it boils down to empathy - the more you can think about change in the context of how it impacts specific people, the better you'll be able to manage it.
I really, really, really like Snow Leopard[1], but there are a some features they’ve added that I really like, such as autosaving, fullscreen, and word lookup.
I’d still go back to Snow Leopard if I could, I don’t quite agree Apple has added nothing of value. There are things I would miss.
I'll add to the OP that implementing new features isn't the only reason change happens. Many developers and marketers have a fetish for change for the sake of change. There have been many times when a product I use has undergone a redesign, except along with a visual redesign most of its features took twice as long to access. Information that was available with one click now required two or three.
There are several XDDs that drive this; fad, resume, and other driven-development methodologies.
"Implemented site in X" may not help either users or operators, but may advance the developer's career. Or evenmerely provide the developer the impression it might.
[+] [-] flohofwoe|6 years ago|reply
Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the "maintenance surface" becomes bigger and bigger.
What should happen of course is that the product's feature set is frozen at the "peak version", and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that's a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and "software as a service" which they like so much. From the customer's point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don't add any value, right?
Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the 'average customer' (which doesn't exist btw) isn't pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.
[+] [-] yoz-y|6 years ago|reply
If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.
[+] [-] mrunkel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkrubner|6 years ago|reply
Also, as others often said, 5.0 seemed like a broken release, and the ".1" was a much bigger upgrade than is normally implied by a non-major-version number. So it is version 5.1, and not version 5.0, that is remembered fondly.
[+] [-] collyw|6 years ago|reply
To be fair there probably hundreds of subtle improvements over Windows 98, but no horrendous game changers like when Ubuntu went from Gnome to Unity.
[+] [-] whatever_dude|6 years ago|reply
Despite one's opinion of Flash as a web alternative or its license, it was a great way to run interactive content on a browser, and they kept adding features to their native IDE ("Flash" itself) and capabilities to the player (including the SWF spec).
It eventually reached a point where there was not much more to add to it: it could play video (novel at the time) and audio (including live synthesis), use sockets, etc etc, and do some pretty advanced stuff supported by the player/spec. But none of that sold Flash IDE licenses, so they _had_ to add more features to the IDE. One of these features was the ability to do Bones, a pretty common animation feature.
To me that's what marked the IDE decline. I used to create a lot of Flash content, but stopped using it at that point too. Not because of bones, but it was symbolic of the moment. I still created Flash apps for years, but it was always by creating fresh, "stage-less" projects, compiled from source code (the right way to go anyway).
Bones itself is a great feature, but at the time Flash the IDE was already way behind other animation tools that exported to Flash like ToonBoom. Adding that feature just made it clear that they didn't know what direction to go with the IDE: it wasn't the best animation tool (despite having kickstarted a market!), it wasn't the best dev tool, just a bit of both with very few people who needed both. No surprise it stopped selling even while the platform was thriving online, circa 2010.
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
Can we agree that, realistically, generally users are not in control of the software development process, despite any organisational structures that appear to let users drive it.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|6 years ago|reply
FL Studio is a long-standing, and much loved software package for audio production.
Since its beginning FL Studio has had the following policy: Once you buy the software, all updates are free for life.
The counterpoint is that each new version of the software has gotten better and better. Therefore, the purchase of FL Studio license both has fantastic current and future value, and has earned intense customer loyalty and online reputation, generating substantial word-of-mouth sales---like what I am doing right here, right now.
[+] [-] dade_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|6 years ago|reply
Things like adding features to solve a problem, when those problems only affect a small percentage of users, is something I see a lot. Especially in the beginning of a product when you’re not 100% sure what you’re making or who you’re making it for and you want to appease all of your customers so you don’t lose them.
Or the feature added is too complex to be useful for a user without training / tutorials, of which few users will undertake that time investment.
I have yet to be on a team where features were not trying to directly address a customer issue / complaint, but maybe I’ve been lucky.
[+] [-] DougN7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|6 years ago|reply
Beginning: Slow and almost no return. Slow being a lot of intellectual effort to lay the foundation. No return being the foundation does not do anything useful, yet.
Middle: Fast and linear return. Building on a sound foundation allow adding feature that is simple and with high quality; and the return is linear to the effort.
End-of-life: Slow and almost no return. Bloated software eventually is dragged down by historical burden (tech debt, legacy features, etc.). Massive effort is needed to add feature, and the return is almost painful to stand.
A lot of recent software took the approach of forced update to extend the middle life. Like the chrome today is considerably different thing than its beginning. Py3 tries to demolish its historical legacy, and embrace new foundations.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] johnchristopher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
I side with you 100% on that
The meme about software being an act of non-stop bicycle reinvention has never been more true to life than it is now
[+] [-] jv22222|6 years ago|reply
Edit: I know more about Sifter than Basecamp. I login to Basecamp every few years and it seems like not too much has changed to my untrained eye, but maybe they did stuff under the hood. For sure I know that Sifter got to what they considered peak features and stopped.
[+] [-] KajMagnus|6 years ago|reply
And then youa add a plugin and extensions API, so people can continue adding features, without annoying anyone — although the product is "frozen".
Isn't browser like FF and Chrome an ok example of this b.t.w.?
[+] [-] russdpale|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isalmon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
..."add value"
My theory is MVP is what they ship, then it's about the monetizing.
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnday|6 years ago|reply
Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they don't really care. People originally balked at the reactions feature, calling it gauche and unnecessary - but now people use it as part of the language of the platform without a second thought.
Compare with Twitter. Every UI "overhaul" they've ever done has been received in a hugely negative way. The only change which has been remotely successful was the 140/280 switch.
The difference is threefold:
First, Twitter's UI changes have been big. They skip over incremental changes and go straight for gigantic overhauls. This requires people re-learn the language of the site completely every couple of years.
Second, these changes have invariably been coupled with user-hostile design decisions. The obvious one this time round is the automatic switching to "AI sorted timeline" on every visit. No wonder people have an almost pavlovian response to the design changes.
And thirdly, while Facebook's changes are usually to accommodate changing usage patterns, new features, or new hardware, Twitter's updates are very transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience for any sector of the market. Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place.
Gosh I didn't expect this to be such a long rant. Turns out I have a lot to say about the terrible design decisions made over in Twitter land. The conclusion is this: people don't hate change. They hate change which makes their lives worse than the status quo would have done. It's not complicated.
[+] [-] _nalply|6 years ago|reply
She has a point. Updates and nagging dialogs have a cost which is higher for non-IT people. Imagine your old neighbor being confused if he should allow that update or not and being stressed about because these update requests don't stop coming in.
[+] [-] redbeard0x0a|6 years ago|reply
> Software is done, like mowing the lawn is done.
We live in an imperfect world, if we want to keep ourselves safe and prevent bad actors out of our data/technology. Updates are a part of the process. You don't mow your lawn once, it has to be maintained. Which is the same as software.
This is something that we would be all better for if we could teach this concept to everybody so that updates are just a normal part of life.
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
When I worked at reddit I told this story, and we ended up using the same technique to move from a two line display to a three line display. Each day we slight changed the spacing to make it larger, until we had enough room for the three lines, and then we switched to three lines. Some people even responded to people's complaints by saying, "but it doesn't take up any more space than the old two line display!". Of course this was reddit, and at the time the code was totally open source, so someone found the daily checkins to change the spacing and outed us, forcing us to put the "compress the link display" checkbox into the preferences, which is still there to this day.
[+] [-] mynameishere|6 years ago|reply
To save people from checking, this seems to turn off the preview images and the link scores. Not sure what 2- vs 3-line is referring to.
[+] [-] shawndrost|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneepic|6 years ago|reply
Back when I worked in medical software, it fucked up doctors' and nurses' workflow very, very badly for a whole workday (could be anywhere from 8-24+ hours), and it might stay the same way for years. Because even if they tell us to revert it, it's so low on our priority list that it just stays there forever. Users can complain forever and nothing will change because we refuse to prioritize the very thing they're asking for.
Tech co's don't really have a satisfying answer to this issue IMO. The most we do is bring in a few people off the street every few months to test the whole system, but usually we seem to just say "LG2M" when another engineer on the team says it should be fine. That's an engineer, not a user. You won't get quality feedback.
I guess when you keep telling new engineers some dark shit like, "Users don't know what they want", your industry will get pretty callous to its customer base.
[+] [-] tmikaeld|6 years ago|reply
Every time they change something in Windows, they never take the old thing away but instead keep both. Which means there's a myriad of ways to get to the control panel. And there's multiple variants of the control panel UI...
Outlook is another good example, there's 3 different UI's where we can add/remove accounts.
Result: New users use the new (default) UI, old users use the old UI, admins use what's quickest.
[+] [-] nemacol|6 years ago|reply
For every other change you have to click "Additional mouse options" and are taken to the old UI.
MS Win10, and to a lesser extent Server 2016-19 has increased the number of clicks it takes me to get to the thing dramatically.
In 7 I relied heavily on the search feature - it was wonderful to type "Programs and" hit enter and get to the page I want. Today they have hidden (in win10) those old UI screens.
It is frustrating.
I would accept the new UI if it had feature parity, but it can't even perform the most basic tasks (mouse pointer speed for example).
Edit - Spelling.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bla3|6 years ago|reply
The problem is of course that UX designers get so used to dismissing that initial criticism that they sometimes dismiss valid criticism that leads to long-term user unhappiness as well.
[+] [-] panic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
You probably shouldn't do major redesigns with no real benefit to the user (I'm looking at you, reddit), but if you're adding or improving functionality, then feel free to incrementally improve your site constantly. People will get used to constant small improvements and will miss them if they stop.
Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy.
[+] [-] stcredzero|6 years ago|reply
Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times Yes!
Here's the right way to do a UI revamp: Introduce your powerful, better, shiny new UI as a clone of the old UI. Once the clone is of high fidelity, then introduce the ability to switch to new "skins" or new "modes" which have the new powerful features, or the better UX. Perhaps even set up a scenario with 2 or more competing to win new users.
The proper way is to let users discover and move to the new thing. Imposing new UI/UX on users just degrades goodwill, and it also hides data about where the new version has flaws or needs improvement. Adopting change needs to be a "pull" and not a "push."
[+] [-] infinity0|6 years ago|reply
This resulted in lots of internal memes mocking these UX designers.
Totally agree with everything this article says, fuck arrogant UX designers coming into my office and rearranging my workspace, fuck you coming into my house and rearranging my furniture.
(If you attempt to justify this by "it's not your product it's the company's", you are really missing the point, and you shouldn't be a UX designer. Human emotions don't care about legal structures.)
[+] [-] wstuartcl|6 years ago|reply
IMHO this is one of the hardest problems to solve with long lived applications. What changes can be made, what features can be added or changed and what "look and feel" changes can be made without tilting the affinity of the current users vs expanding the value proposition for new ones.
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|6 years ago|reply
This is why I gave up my iPhone X. I just hated constantly re-learning Apple's new paradigm du-jour, and I absolutely loathed FaceID and the notch.
Now I have a OnePlus 7 Pro, with "Touch ID" and no notch, and except for some friends occasionally saying "why are you not blue" I am happy as a clam. I never want a "Face ID" and I never want a "notch." (I don't care about bezels, etc.)
Now, I'm considering dropping the rest of Apple from my life, after a 15 year Apple-only lifestyle. It's really the "touch bar," when all I really want is an ESC key and real F keys, and the fact that I have to repair my laptop every six months because some key or other is broken again. And, it's not even a "wait 20 minutes while we replace the keyboard" but more of a "wait a few days to a week" and god hope they don't charge you $700. Ridiculous.
[+] [-] egorfine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkin|6 years ago|reply
I know from my experience, that most valuable users will contact you directly (e-mail, support, twitter, other way) to describe their experiences before and after the change, telling you what exactly hurts them.
Rest of them are pointless trolls with "First Comment Rule". What is that? First negative comment will spark negative discussion, so trolls spark them to pressure on company/product. There is a lot of companies that will write, "I am sorry", and will start to move backwards because of that.
How to live with that? Listen, adapt, yet don't care about everything or everyone. :)
[+] [-] mung|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rainymood|6 years ago|reply
>This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric (...)
While this whole post reeks with entitlement and egocentrism - but from his perspective, so that is OK!
To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger user base than himself and only thinks about his benefit and how the changes affect him and how he uses the product.
>Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the vague and nebulous future.
This is simply not true. Depending on what you buy (a physical product like a bike) or a software subscription (like photoshop), you get those upgrades whether you want it or not. You don't want it? Then DONT BUY THE PRODUCT. Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don't like it? You go to the freaking competitor!
I understand the authors frustrations but customers have the ultimate final say in anything by voting with their wallet.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
Upgrading from v1 to v2 of your product is no different than migrating from your product to your competitor's product, except you probably have better compatibility. If your competitors offer good-enough compatibility, or you break backwards compatibility, even this advantage is lost.
Just as with data structures, we should build software itself as generally immutable. The successor to version X, in most cases, is version Y of something else. The exception seems to be filling out features. If your v1 is good but sparse, then adding missing features is an obvious win for users, too. That means, though, that you need to publish your roadmap. Customers can't plan around arbitrary releases and mystery features.
[+] [-] emilfihlman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
All change is interpreted by how it impacts the individual. The article laid out one possible scenario where this results in bad will. But it is broader than that. It is broader than product design. If you look at the people in your world, and think about how they will react to a change, you'll get a picture of how a change will come across, whether that is a product change, a process change, an organizational change, etc.
At the end of it all, it boils down to empathy - the more you can think about change in the context of how it impacts specific people, the better you'll be able to manage it.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
I’d still go back to Snow Leopard if I could, I don’t quite agree Apple has added nothing of value. There are things I would miss.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224370
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
"Implemented site in X" may not help either users or operators, but may advance the developer's career. Or evenmerely provide the developer the impression it might.