This was actually not the conclusion I was expecting:
> 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.
I can tell you from personal experience on a UX team why it happens:
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 can't think of the last time I encountered a UX change I thought was actually worth it.
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.
I just wanted to say I agree and I was thinking this would be the conclusion as well.
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....
> I claim there are two reasons UX changes happen:
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.
I really like the new IntelliJ UI. It’s a blatant rip-off of VS Code but I like VS code so I’m fine with it. Removes a bunch of lesser-used features from the main view and feels a lot cleaner.
There’s a flip side to this. If you change the UI for no reason, people get upset. For example, the latest iOS update flipped the speaker and mute buttons during a call. Why? No improvement was made, it’s just frustrating.
I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. Even if you believe you have a functional reason, you had better think really long and hard about whether the supposed improvement you want is worth the pain of every single user needing to adapt to that change.
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.
The next Windows version should be called Windows Legacy.
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.
Mozilla-related forums are currently full of complaints about the new design of Thunderbird. It has also flipped the UI with no option of reverting it back other than using an unsupported CSS hack: https://i.imgur.com/9xzJjtr.png
This article needs an update to after this version where Microsoft used a touch-friendly calculator that took up half the screen and somehow took a second+ to load.
I get the point, but doesn't changing floating-point to arbitrary precision so that 10.21 - 10.2 = 0.01 and not 0.0100000000000016 count as a user-visible change? Or should they have put a "now with bugs fixed" sticker on it?
I think part of this is that the user would not try 10.21- 10.2 again if they have already seen it fail, but a graphical update alongside denotes that this thing is "new" again.
There's a lot of truth to this. Back when I was doing UI for a big bank, I urged them to cleanup their frontend technical debt and unify their interface into a more consistent modern look and feel. They ignored it and I ended up leaving rather than hack into jQuery all day.
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.
Strategy I've taken in some places is: do not loop in UX or advertise this is a big rewrite. UX, PMs, and some engineers just cannot resist the opportunity to change the UI around and your important tech debt works gets blamed for the rest of the org's fiddling.
Notepad has had some surprising improvements. I've not used it in so long that when I did open it and saw it had tabs, and recover unsaved documents, and dark mode, I wasn't sure it was notepad.
OTOH with these changes, the new UX of being able to recover unsaved documents made it so that Windows sees no problem with restarting or shutting down on me without my approval even if I have a notepad open.
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.
> if you dug into Vista, you'd find quite a few substantive technical improvements over the now-ancient Windows XP. But many of those improvements were under the hood, and thus invisible to the typical user.
The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.
More like, if you ship useless apps, people learn to avoid.
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.
jcgrillo|1 year ago
> 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.
nkrisc|1 year ago
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.
Attummm|1 year ago
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.
scotty79|1 year ago
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.
thih9|1 year ago
This could be even not because of some flawed initial design, but due to unrelated technology advancements that are available just now.
mk_stjames|1 year ago
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....
edanm|1 year ago
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.
ignoramous|1 year ago
I mean, I am terribly glad we're done with Windows 95 and Android 4 style UX; aren't you?
linehedonist|1 year ago
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/new-ui.html
binarymax|1 year ago
zootboy|1 year ago
ignoramous|1 year ago
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.
windows2020|1 year ago
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.
ReadCarlBarks|1 year ago
fbdab103|1 year ago
erehweb|1 year ago
water-your-self|1 year ago
DDayMace|1 year ago
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.
rendaw|1 year ago
gedy|1 year ago
ldjkfkdsjnv|1 year ago
politelemon|1 year ago
xerox13ster|1 year ago
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.
eterm|1 year ago
dataflow|1 year ago
The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.
wruza|1 year ago
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.
Chiron1991|1 year ago
amadeuspagel|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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