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> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, co

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you want to look up: the Aesthetic Usability Effect. Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. > Summary: Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say. From https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/ See also: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/perceived-value/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/perceived-value/ (other ways users perceive value based on the UI) Of course, this has limits. A rebrand or redesign that, all other things equal, is mostly the same quality as before probably won't get much benefit. I've seen many redesigns and that tends not to be something people do—there's usually a good bump in visual quality in the process. So, regardless of whether you, personally notice the different functionality, many redesigns are actually a success at improving the perceived value, perceived usability, and overall evaluation of the brand, company, and product. People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Building respect across those boundaries is a rare and valuable thing.

blunte 8y ago
As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost. It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!" So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interactive, text fields with labels only approximated by gray text within that field, and on and on. Many old UIs were uglier but more usable.
- hopler 8y ago
  Explain why the hamburger menu is bad but the floppy disk icon is good.
  - Scarblac 8y ago
    The floppy disk icon does one thing: "Save". Everybody knows it does, because that's been its job for ages now. What it looks like is irrelevant. The hamburger menu _replaced_ the style of menu we used to have, where all the options were under their own menus with titles ("File", and so on). That was lost. The only reason they were left behind was to make it work well on tiny screens. If you don't have a tiny screen, you just lost functionality that you were familiar with and that worked, for no reason.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- calinet6 8y ago
  A lot of that isn’t the redesign itself, but the fact that almost no one designs for the change event itself. It’s a whole different problem to solve, and it’s usually just dropping you into something totally different without context. Could write a whole blog post on designing for UX change. I think I’ll do that...
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  On phone apps, if I noticed the UI 9/10 of the times I notice a UI change it's because I opened it do do something, but all I can see is a tutorial on how to use the new UI.
- btschaegg 8y ago
  Note that there sadly also is a very strong effect that also can "ruin" (in principle) good redesigns for existing users: When all else fails (i.e. you are not able to guide your design by existing metaphors etc.), humans learn by repetition. That's why consistency with other products is usually not a bad idea: Search bars are usually to the top right, so when you put yours there, a new user will know where to look. OTOH, this also means that for a user who has used your product for ten years, the fact that your search bar is, in fact, not in the top right, doesn't matter -- because they have learned where it is. If you move it, they will be upset, even if the new design might objectively be more intuitive (as in: new users have less trouble with it). This effect can make it rather hard at times to judge if a redesign of a product you've used for a long time is in fact as bad as you believe it to be.
inertiatic 8y ago
>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.
- calinet6 8y ago
  I'll concede "most people are of average idiocy" and cite core principles of statistics and the meanings of average and most. But yes, you're right, happens all the time. Less so with most of the large scale more popular redesigns people tend to think of when writing articles like this about tools they actually use; the team at Atlassian, for example, is not made of idiots, neither at Slack, Google, Twitter, or other large companies with mostly significant design experience. Smaller operations where we all likely work—yep, hit or miss.
  - camhart 8y ago
    I and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as small. Though I don't think its fair to call someone an idiot for this reason--I think its very challenging to do well.
    - spease 8y ago
      Yeah, I specifically avoid using Atlassian as much as I can because of how tedious it is to wait ~6 seconds for every UI action to complete.
    - groestl 8y ago
      An idiot, in the original sense of the word, is someone who focuses on themselves, showing no interest in the common cause/politics. It's a bit heavy, but reapplied here it could mean someone who focuses completely on visual quality, while not putting their time into other important aspects of the product (almost all of which are more important that visual quality, at least according to OP).
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing." Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time. Most UI redesigns are bad because they focus on the wrong things and throw out a lot of good things, or change for the sake of change.
- pfranz 8y ago
  At a previous job I would see the process of films getting made. After a year of keeping the same joke they'd swap it out with a less funny joke. It's not because the new joke is better, the old joke got tired to them and the new joke was fresh. I see the same thing happen all over the place--branding and UI are very common victims.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    That's a very interesting insight. Music editing has the same issues as well. Even in the short term - over the course of a day your ears can get tired of a specific set of sounds and you don't hear with 'fresh ears'.
  - eswat 8y ago
    That’s a cool example. In terms of UI redesigns though, changing things up is definitely more costly in this realm. I probably don’t mind a new skit because I’m just looking to be entertained. But I’m mostly looking to get shit done with something that had an actual UI to it, so freshness can be more hit-or-miss.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time. This is part of the general phenomenon of looking for your keys under the lamppost. It's easy to do an experiment that tests how people feel about your new design after looking at it for a minute and a half. Want to compare how people feel about the old and new designs after six months of getting used to them? That will take at least six months.
wvenable 8y ago
What's the difference between a re-design and constant refinement of a design? I believe in making products aesthetically pleasing. I spend a lot of time ensuring my products look good because I know that this is the first impression of any product. I'm constantly improving the design of my products in subtle (and sometimes not subtle) ways. Full redesigns are the design equivalent of full software rewrites. They suffer from all the same issues: second system affect, loss of functionality, loss of knowledge, etc. And like software re-writes, sometimes they are necessary but often they are not.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Redesigns tend to happen because someone in management decides they want to remake the UI in a way that appeals to them, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else. The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. Flat design was in a similar league, but not quite as bad. Is that a button or a text element? How can anyone tell? Refinement is a much harder challenge. Improving the aesthetics of something while making it subtly easier to use is a really difficult thing to do.
  - d0100 8y ago
    I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.
    - atoav 8y ago
      yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?
      - duckmysick 8y ago
        Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.
deleted 8y ago
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gjs278 8y ago
I bet you have ruined several designs that were perfectly fine
kevingadd 8y ago
Most redesigns I've dealt with are the result of someone wanting a promotion, which has nothing to do with whether or not they're an idiot. Many of those people ship bad or half-baked redesigns that waste everyone's time but get them a promotion, because you need achievements to point to in order to get promoted at companies like Google. That aside, your post mostly fails to address the critiques in the OP. Yes, a pleasing UI tends to feel better to use, but most of these pretty redesigns throw away important other traits an old design had, or just simply lack them. It's hard to positively compare (for example) New Gmail with Old Gmail when they managed to make it slower and break the reply button, for example.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  It is damn near amazing how fast old Gmail is did you know that you can still use it? It uses like a mb of ram and loads instantly.
  - christophilus 8y ago
    How do you use the old Gmail? I hate, hate, hate the new one.
    - jazzyjackson 8y ago
      They hide it behind this strange URL https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/ https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/ You should see a banner with an option to 'set basic HTML as default view' across the top. It's great. You see all the information - nothing hidden behind icons, and page loads between screens actually take less time than with a SPA.
      - WalterSear 8y ago
        Wow.
mannykannot 8y ago
I have used a quite a lot of online retail sites, and for me, the thing that most distinguishes the good from the bad is the quality of their search features, in giving me the tools to focus on relevant results. The most visible feature of many of the sites I visit are the attempts to get me to do something other than what I went to the site for.
- Aegaeus10111 8y ago
  I'd like to point out that the search and how the results are displayed are part of the design - and can be the major bit. UI design isn't only, often not even primarily, about aesthetics.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    Bad UI design might cripple a good search capability, but UI design cannot fix a weak one.
    - Aegaeus10111 8y ago
      True. But you might as well say the same about an umbrella not keeping mosquitoes away. UI design doesn't involve BE design in any way. So?
      - mannykannot 8y ago
        So you are saying UI is not involved in the most important measure of quality of a retail site - that is the point, and the answer to your "so?" (though, personally, I would not make the distinction as stark as you have, here.)
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    UI redesigns frequently are primarily about aesthetics. You don't have to completely redesign your site to redesign your search.
    - 8y ago
pdonis 8y ago
> Visual design quality does have an impact. A negative one, based on what you quote: "This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing." Which seems to be saying that the uglier you make your UI, the better your chances of having actual usability issues surface.
- Mtinie 8y ago
  This is the reason design isn’t a simple concept. The non-aesthetic portions of the effort (contextual and ethnographic research, information architecture, general usability, workflows, requirement generation, etc.) need to be done just so those warts can be exposed. After the fundamentals are solid it’s then important to apply appropriate aesthetic and interactive elements to polish the experience. Simply jumping to visual design after skipping the fundamentals is nearly assuring a failure. It would be akin to worrying about performance and scaling of product’s database and API without first considering if the data schemas and underlying technology stack even meet the operational needs. Addendum: “Evolutionary design” instead of “revolutionary design” is typically preferred if one would like to keep a connection between how something was done before and the (hopefully) improved version.
rarecoil 8y ago
> I've seen many redesigns and that tends not to be something people do—there's usually a good bump in visual quality in the process. So really, the important point is that you can gain affordances for usability sins if you have a design that is appealing to people as modern or otherwise trendy. By the same process: if you have a design that was 100% usable, then redesign and end up making usability mistakes, there's a good chance you'll see net-zero or negative from the prettier UI in your testing. For the majority of companies that do not have focus groups, usability labs, and a design staff that can spend cycles on R&D, it seems you may be better off doing little more than reskinning existing UI controls to maintain trendiness than full-scale re-wires of your existing product at any time to maximize the aesthetic-usability effect for minimal design work. Examples you cite in a sibling comment have cash to burn on exactly this, however I think that is the exception rather than the norm for businesses at large. Visual (aesthetic) design change buys goodwill, reinforces and differentiates brand image, but IMO is mostly a marketing tool at the end of the day. I see product design and visual design as sister disciplines that must communicate, similar to two people running a three-legged race, but it is easy to improve one or the other separately from the other in most iterative scenarios. Large-scale redesigns are usually risky, and Snapchat's a great high-profile example of a company that was able to hire talent and let that process go off the rails.
mrighele 8y ago
> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. On the other side, it will be less usable while i have to relearn how to use it. This is not an issue if it happens from time to time, you pay upfront a decrease of productivity and will be rewarded greatly later on. But in the era of SaaS we are constantly subject to a stream of redesigns, sometimes small, other times global. You cannot finish adapting to a change that another comes. I don't know about others, but for me is deeply frustrating.
- speedplane 8y ago
  I don't mind functional UI updates (e.g., adding a search bar, when previously you had to scroll). But design changes are made simply for design purposes by big-tech companies are frustrating because when they do an update, it puts pressure on everyone else to follow their design to avoid looking out of date. For example, just a few months ago, Google used square rectangles for the search bar, and advocated "cards" with sharp corners in their material design standards. However, just recently, they updated gmail and google search to use rounded rectangles in the search bar instead of rectangles. Are rectangles better or worse than rounded rectangles? Yes? No? The answer is, it doesn't matter for usability. But because Google is so big and has such influence, now, if your site uses a rectangular search bar with sharp corners users will perceive it as "dated". There are many similar examples of this. Microsoft's metro UI was cool and popular for maybe a full 6 months. Clean Helvetica font was everyone's aspiration, then Google pushed Lato, and now it's Robato, until they change their mind again. Small 11pt font used to be the norm, then very large readable 14pt font was the norm, and now we're back to something like 12pt. Single page applications a while ago were avoided, then became so popular they were effectively a pre-requisite, and now they should only be used "where appropriate". I think Google make these changes not to make their site look good and refreshing, but to make everyone else's look old and dated.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Round rects are better. Apple established that 30 years ago. Sharp corners are a fad that Microsoft(!) started with Windows Phone/10 just to be different from Apple (their chronic problem of trying to compete by doing randomly different things) and the Googlee going for it with cards, before they realized rounded rects are preferred for a reason. (And cards, what an innovation, copying the original desktop application GUI language from cascading/tiling window systems and HyperCard
Aeolun 8y ago
In my experience, only about 40% of redesigns actually are a visual upgrade. All the others are just a visual change. Visual changes are irrelevant at best, and actively harmful at worst. By all means, improve the website and the design, but actually improve it.
deepstream 8y ago
Funny thing about AUE is that it hides usability issues. People get dazzled by the look, and feel it's better than it is. This means the OP is correct. New paint doesn't make it more useful. To really help users, optimize for usable design, not just aesthetics.
- aclissold 8y ago
  Why not both?
  - bloomer 8y ago
    Limited time and resources
    - calinet6 8y ago
      There is a balance. If aesthetics are a limiting factor, as determined by research, then they’re worth improving.
magicalhippo 8y ago
> Main principle you want to look up: the Aesthetic Usability Effect. Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. Well that explains a few things. Many a time have I experienced a UI remake looking great but being absolutely horrible to use. Take for example Google+, where they tried a last ditch effort to make it more popular by doing a UI update. They made it look really slick, but in the process made it much, much worse to actually use. I used to be an active G+ user (yeah, I know) but after they forced me to use the new UI I stopped using it, it was that bad. Another example is Acronis TrueImage, which completely redid their UI, making it much more visually pleasing and up-to-date. Initially I thought it was great, but then I noticed that certain processes were a lot more tedious to do, and they'd also removed a lot of functionally in the process.
maxhallinan 8y ago
How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect account for the success of websites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, classic Reddit, and LinkedIn, to name a few? There seems to be no correlation between aesthetic quality and use of these sites. I'm not sure what that indicates about the "usability" of these sites. If the goal is to maximize the number of users, it would seem that there is some evidence that a sense of usability determined by aesthetic quality is not that important.
- Retra 8y ago
  People aren't using those sites because of their UIs, but because of the content they offer. UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor.
  - logifail 8y ago
    > UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor. Necessary for what (or for whom)?
    - Retra 8y ago
      A UI is necessary for users to use your product. That doesn't mean the UI is your product.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- username223 8y ago
  I know this will never happen, but it would be interesting to see the percentage of Reddit users who took the time to opt out of the new "improved" interface. I suspect that number is small, because most people have learned to just quietly sigh and accept random UI changes, but larger than the Reddit UI team would care to admit.
  - gwern 8y ago
    If you are a moderator of a reasonably popular subreddit, you can find out by checking the traffic statistics which breaks out old vs new! For example, for my little link-sharing subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/) : https://imgur.com/a/sUcEQeQ https://imgur.com/a/sUcEQeQ You can see a large fraction of the users have taken the time to optout, perhaps as much as a third (!) of those who can. Considering how passive most users are, this tells me that the new & expensive Reddit design is indeed loathed.
ftio 8y ago
I come bearing anecdata! At my previous company, we did a minor visual design refresh of our ancient software because our sales data showed that one of the top objections cited by prospects was that the software looked old. Although the visual design refresh did nothing for usability, it completely eliminated that objection and enabled our sales team to focus on how our software could improve our customers’ businesses and why it was better than our competitors’. The redesign improved conversion rates. The redesign caused a bit of consternation among existing customers, but they got over it quickly. It had no observable effect on retention/churn. If you were a PM on my team unable to substantiate why the work you’re scheduling helps the business (by making life better for customers or by reducing purchasing friction), you wouldn’t be on my team for long. These pointless redesigns are amateur-hour stuff. Of course, there are other legitimate reasons to do a redesign, like maintainability and developer retention/happiness, but those are much riskier and even more difficult to justify.
zzzcpan 8y ago
> Users are more tolerant of __minor__ usability issues Let's be honest, aesthetic-usability effect is too insignificant to ever prioritize aesthetics over usability and pretty much no company in the world can benefit from it. It's just a justification for producing pretty looking interfaces with awful UX, because UX is hard, a typical designer on the market likely can't even do it and eye candy is more easily sellable in hierarchical organizations, where everyone can impress their bosses all the way to the top.
ThomPete 8y ago
Ive done this for more than 20 years too and i dont think the article is as wrong as you seem to think. In general designers seem to think that design is a much more important aapect than it actually is. Sucessful redesigns arent about improving the percieved value or respect the work outside your own department. They are about solving specific problems that hinder business to be optimal. When you start asking people to respect your work as a blanket statement, you lose mine.
werber 8y ago
UI !== UX, without the research side it is kinda pointless. I'm not sure if the point of the article was to say that but it's what I read
- Theodores 8y ago
  Thank goodness someone has chimed in with this. The original article has no mention of UX. UI developers are getting marched out the door at a well known publisher right now, their services no longer needed. UX is a different story with this mystery publisher, they now get to call a lot of the shots. There is a bigger discussion to be had regarding the whole visual design process. In 2006 when you could have your navigation in any corner of the screen with any design for the search icon it made sense to have UI designers add their special flourishes. Now we know where the navigation goes and what the icon is for search, that has all been settled. User experience still needs some people to take care of it as we can't leave that up to the programmers, can we?
christophilus 8y ago
I do tend to avoid sites that look too old. But I also avoid sites that are too slow. I'm no longer a Gmail user for this reason, for example, and I'm only a Reddit user because (thank God) there's still old.reddit.com. Can I just advocate for one thing? Make performance the #1 priority of any redesign (or at least a very, very high priority).
- cousin_it 8y ago
  When designers try to justify themselves, they commit many sins, but performance problems are usually due to programmers trying to justify themselves.
Waterluvian 8y ago
The fundamental challenge I have with UX and UX people is that there's clearly a lot of really important, useful stuff in the discipline, mixed with a lot of nonsense. And I've been burned a few times by those who tell a good story to susceptible executives and utterly waste time and resources to justify their own existence. I wish there were better resources for non UX people like me to learn how to tell the difference.
- werber 8y ago
  When UX veers away from research and data it gets nasty. I think the situation you're describing is something that happens when their isn't full buy in from the stake holders on the value of that research
- azhenley 8y ago
  What you describe is true in any area, including software developers. You could just start learning about UX. It’ll make you a better engineer!
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I think you're partly right that it is true in any area. But I don't think it's equally true in every area, and I think that UX lends itself a bit more to subjective artsyness than software development. But I generally agree with your sentiment; you can absolutely find "just trust me" in software development. You can also probably smell it out better by learning about it more.
    - azhenley 8y ago
      If you do want to stay away from the “artsy” side, search for “usability engineering” and “interaction design”. You’ll find a lot more about empirically driven methods to evaluate your UI, mostly from a productivity perspective. I personally find it fascinating!
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      > more to subjective artsyness than software development. You would think so, but the amount of 'developer superstition' and and 'gut feeling' I've faced in development is quite high.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. Of course perception and reality are different things. And I imagine that effect is only really true for, at best, some slight statistical majority. Certainly I know a lot of people who've stuck with older versions of software because it looks and works like they've come to expect, and I myself tend to judge the usability of new software by how much it looks like a Win95 application. The thing I love most about only developing software for in-house use (because my company doesn't sell software) is that nobody really cares what it looks like.
doodpants 8y ago
> Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a guy who owns a computer and uses software. Most GUI redesigns I've seen in the past 10 years make the interface prettier, but LESS usable. The new design usually incoroporates three categories of changes: 1. Lists of items are rendered in a larger font with more spacing between items, leading to lower information density, thus requiring more scrolling. (For bonus points, often a window that has a scrollable area isn't resizable, so you're stuck with whatever arbitrary viewport size the designer decided was large enough.) 2. Controls that used to always be visible are now hidden until you hover or click the right spot. This is done to reduce "clutter", as though controls are somehow graffiti. 3. A bunch of convenient shortcuts enjoyed by long-time power users weren't reimplimented in the new design, because the designer didn't know about them, or simply didn't think they mattered. I have a WordPress blog. WordPress recently overhauled their entire editing UI, and I hate it. When I started the blog several years ago, I was able to figure out how to use WordPress by exploring the UI. The new UI is an extreme example of #2; when you go to write a new post, the page is entirely blank. You have to click somewhere to get a text cursor, and there isn't even a visually delineated text area before you do so. There are a couple of features I had to hunt around for, and I wouldn't have even known those features existed if I hadn't learned them from the old UI, which presented them front and center. My company uses JIRA for bug tracking. They switched to a new GUI a while back, and I hate it. It's harder to find things that used to be presented front and center. And as an example of #3: It used to be possible to just type an issue number like "392" in the search box, hit Enter, and be brought immediately to that issue page. Not anymore; if you do that quickly, you get a "no results found" page. If you type the number and then wait a couple of seconds, you get a list of search results, which you can then click on. Pressing Enter then takes you to the first one, but often that is NOT issue #392, it's just some issue that happens to have the text "392" somewhere in it. So you have to eyeball the search results, and then click the right one. The old way was more convenient. Fortunately, I eventually found the preference to switch back to the old GUI, which they helpfully give you because they apparently realize that the new GUI sucks. (I don't know offhand if it reverts the search behavior, because I've already changed my habits to not use it anymore.)
Spooky23 8y ago
People aren’t idiots, but reinventing the front end is like starting over and needs to be done in one fell swoop. Usually that means redesign on the quick which always equals missed features. The classic example is when everyone jumped on responsive web design. Many applications and sites ended up including 80% of the elements of the desktop page and dropping other elements. Like my bank, who eliminated the ability to see your routing number and account number.
naasking 8y ago
> In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Did you read the article? The author specifically says, "Before all of the UI designers that read this go out and riot and champion against me for saying UI redesigns are a waste of time, let me say that I do value design. I think at the bare minimum, a product or website needs to be usable, and if you possess a good eye and steady hand, you should feel compelled to create something that looks pleasing." He then goes on to say, "Just stop redesigning the UI all the time. UI redesigns, in my opinion, are a waste of time 95% of the time. Let me explain further." That's not so contentious IMO. Redesigns can be too frequent and the purported purpose of redesigns is typically nebulous, and can be driven more by politics than any of the objective metrics that you describe. > People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Of course they have reasons. That doesn't make those reasons objectively correct. Maybe you should try to understand and respect the point the article is trying to convey, that perhaps the pendulum on UI redesign has swung a little too far one way.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > That doesn't make those reasons objectively correct. You don't even need to appeal to some 'objective correct' standard. You can just look more basically at "what is the purpose?" Usually, it's "increase sales". So... determine baseline metrics, perhaps implement some testing to see what changes have what effect, and then push forward a larger redesign effort if the tests moved towards the goal/purpose. Perhaps the goal is 'reduce number of clicks'. Is that really important? Or is it 'reduce user frustration'? How will you measure that? "Reduce page load time" - should be pretty easy to measure, but will it have an impact on other things (sales, support, etc)? People may have 'good reasons' for a redesign. Without a measurable goal, they're a waste of time, imo, and I've often seen them do more harm than good (measurable harm, like reduced sales, customer drop off, etc). But hey - those front page pictures looked really nice in the photoshop mockups sent over...
- js2 8y ago
  > Did you read the article? Please don’t do this. > Maybe you should try to understand Or this. Reminder: be civil, don’t be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AsyncAwait 8y ago
> Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. This seems like a call to seniority. Just because you've been there for X more years doesn't make your input automatically more valid. I get his disclaimer i.e. 'I am not a designer', but yours just feels a bit like bragging.
tootie 8y ago
Last place I worked did a skunkworks redesign project in their primary e-commerce site and A/B tested it against the existing site (which was perfectly decent) and recorded a consistently higher conversion rate. They could easily put an 8-figure value on the redesign which cost in the high 6-figures to design and implement.
conanbatt 8y ago
> People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Building respect across those boundaries is a rare and valuable thing. I wouldn't frame it this way, but there are many confounding things in measuring a change in the UI design. I jumped from web consumer to operations, and the mindset is so different: in web, you have shallow actions that you want things to be easier and look aesthetically pleasing. In operations you want deep actions that require reliability or learning, and that require every or many users to do it, changing the UI is a nightmare for them. It has to be vastly better to compensate the change. And not only that, you need your operations to be more efficient than your competition: a bad ui can cause issues in an entire company. In consumer-web, pages like reddit changes their entire UI to have posts read in the same page and its use-it or lose-it. Consumer web cruises along the monopolistic positions they have to spend resources without visible consequence. Who cares if reddit's ui is 10% snazzier or 10% snappier? It's not like the reddit user will stop using it because of it. That redesign happened in a company that raised half a billion dollars.
bobblywobbles 8y ago
You sparked a lot of comments in this post. Thank you for explaining these concepts to me, I have not heard of the aesthetic usability effect. I will read into this as I am curious what it is now. To be clear, I do value design. I think design is important and I write that out in the article that I value design. What I struggle to value are redesigns, that is, complete redesigns of a UI - instead preferring incremental updates of the UX that is necessary to use the product or application. Thank you for the work that you've done, as I'm sure you have had a great impact on the customers you've directly and indirectly served. Continue to do design, because if it were up to me, nothing would look good at all. Cheers.
sh87 8y ago
As a user I have not come across any good 'visual' redesign. On the contrary, it annoys me. Immensely; when the fking redesign replaces my known problems for unknown ones. As an example, as contractors, we fill up timesheets very often. Our company decided to move to another 'aesthetically pleasing' platform which to me as a user is same as a redesign. Now the click - tab - 8 - tab - space - cmd+w ritual is taken away. It now goes like this : load page - login - click link - click a drop down - wait for it to timeout (dont even ask me why) - click again and wait for the dropdown to populate and close itself - click again - select - click - 8 - click save - find the mini'x' - click - select another dropdown - click submit (no, space no longer works on this form). This new platform has more options, more whitespace, more corporate colors. Agreed. No colors, whitespace your redesign could add will soothe the agony of poor usability.

blunte 8y ago

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost. It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!" So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interactive, text fields with labels only approximated by gray text within that field, and on and on. Many old UIs were uglier but more usable.

hopler 8y ago
Explain why the hamburger menu is bad but the floppy disk icon is good.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  The floppy disk icon does one thing: "Save". Everybody knows it does, because that's been its job for ages now. What it looks like is irrelevant. The hamburger menu _replaced_ the style of menu we used to have, where all the options were under their own menus with titles ("File", and so on). That was lost. The only reason they were left behind was to make it work well on tiny screens. If you don't have a tiny screen, you just lost functionality that you were familiar with and that worked, for no reason.
- deleted 8y ago
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calinet6 8y ago
A lot of that isn’t the redesign itself, but the fact that almost no one designs for the change event itself. It’s a whole different problem to solve, and it’s usually just dropping you into something totally different without context. Could write a whole blog post on designing for UX change. I think I’ll do that...
marcosdumay 8y ago
On phone apps, if I noticed the UI 9/10 of the times I notice a UI change it's because I opened it do do something, but all I can see is a tutorial on how to use the new UI.
btschaegg 8y ago
Note that there sadly also is a very strong effect that also can "ruin" (in principle) good redesigns for existing users: When all else fails (i.e. you are not able to guide your design by existing metaphors etc.), humans learn by repetition. That's why consistency with other products is usually not a bad idea: Search bars are usually to the top right, so when you put yours there, a new user will know where to look. OTOH, this also means that for a user who has used your product for ten years, the fact that your search bar is, in fact, not in the top right, doesn't matter -- because they have learned where it is. If you move it, they will be upset, even if the new design might objectively be more intuitive (as in: new users have less trouble with it). This effect can make it rather hard at times to judge if a redesign of a product you've used for a long time is in fact as bad as you believe it to be.

inertiatic 8y ago

>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.

calinet6 8y ago
I'll concede "most people are of average idiocy" and cite core principles of statistics and the meanings of average and most. But yes, you're right, happens all the time. Less so with most of the large scale more popular redesigns people tend to think of when writing articles like this about tools they actually use; the team at Atlassian, for example, is not made of idiots, neither at Slack, Google, Twitter, or other large companies with mostly significant design experience. Smaller operations where we all likely work—yep, hit or miss.
- camhart 8y ago
  I and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as small. Though I don't think its fair to call someone an idiot for this reason--I think its very challenging to do well.
  - spease 8y ago
    Yeah, I specifically avoid using Atlassian as much as I can because of how tedious it is to wait ~6 seconds for every UI action to complete.
  - groestl 8y ago
    An idiot, in the original sense of the word, is someone who focuses on themselves, showing no interest in the common cause/politics. It's a bit heavy, but reapplied here it could mean someone who focuses completely on visual quality, while not putting their time into other important aspects of the product (almost all of which are more important that visual quality, at least according to OP).

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing." Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time. Most UI redesigns are bad because they focus on the wrong things and throw out a lot of good things, or change for the sake of change.

pfranz 8y ago
At a previous job I would see the process of films getting made. After a year of keeping the same joke they'd swap it out with a less funny joke. It's not because the new joke is better, the old joke got tired to them and the new joke was fresh. I see the same thing happen all over the place--branding and UI are very common victims.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  That's a very interesting insight. Music editing has the same issues as well. Even in the short term - over the course of a day your ears can get tired of a specific set of sounds and you don't hear with 'fresh ears'.
- eswat 8y ago
  That’s a cool example. In terms of UI redesigns though, changing things up is definitely more costly in this realm. I probably don’t mind a new skit because I’m just looking to be entertained. But I’m mostly looking to get shit done with something that had an actual UI to it, so freshness can be more hit-or-miss.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time. This is part of the general phenomenon of looking for your keys under the lamppost. It's easy to do an experiment that tests how people feel about your new design after looking at it for a minute and a half. Want to compare how people feel about the old and new designs after six months of getting used to them? That will take at least six months.

wvenable 8y ago

What's the difference between a re-design and constant refinement of a design? I believe in making products aesthetically pleasing. I spend a lot of time ensuring my products look good because I know that this is the first impression of any product. I'm constantly improving the design of my products in subtle (and sometimes not subtle) ways. Full redesigns are the design equivalent of full software rewrites. They suffer from all the same issues: second system affect, loss of functionality, loss of knowledge, etc. And like software re-writes, sometimes they are necessary but often they are not.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Redesigns tend to happen because someone in management decides they want to remake the UI in a way that appeals to them, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else. The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. Flat design was in a similar league, but not quite as bad. Is that a button or a text element? How can anyone tell? Refinement is a much harder challenge. Improving the aesthetics of something while making it subtly easier to use is a really difficult thing to do.
- d0100 8y ago
  I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.
  - atoav 8y ago
    yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?
    - duckmysick 8y ago
      Because it's software. Additional options mean additional code, which leads to increased complexity and burden on maintenance. And it's not a linear increase. It doesn't mean you can't add new features (or code), but doing so leads to trade-offs.

deleted 8y ago

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gjs278 8y ago

I bet you have ruined several designs that were perfectly fine

kevingadd 8y ago

Most redesigns I've dealt with are the result of someone wanting a promotion, which has nothing to do with whether or not they're an idiot. Many of those people ship bad or half-baked redesigns that waste everyone's time but get them a promotion, because you need achievements to point to in order to get promoted at companies like Google. That aside, your post mostly fails to address the critiques in the OP. Yes, a pleasing UI tends to feel better to use, but most of these pretty redesigns throw away important other traits an old design had, or just simply lack them. It's hard to positively compare (for example) New Gmail with Old Gmail when they managed to make it slower and break the reply button, for example.

michaelmrose 8y ago
It is damn near amazing how fast old Gmail is did you know that you can still use it? It uses like a mb of ram and loads instantly.
- christophilus 8y ago
  How do you use the old Gmail? I hate, hate, hate the new one.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    They hide it behind this strange URL https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/ https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/ You should see a banner with an option to 'set basic HTML as default view' across the top. It's great. You see all the information - nothing hidden behind icons, and page loads between screens actually take less time than with a SPA.
    - WalterSear 8y ago
      Wow.

mannykannot 8y ago

I have used a quite a lot of online retail sites, and for me, the thing that most distinguishes the good from the bad is the quality of their search features, in giving me the tools to focus on relevant results. The most visible feature of many of the sites I visit are the attempts to get me to do something other than what I went to the site for.

Aegaeus10111 8y ago
I'd like to point out that the search and how the results are displayed are part of the design - and can be the major bit. UI design isn't only, often not even primarily, about aesthetics.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  Bad UI design might cripple a good search capability, but UI design cannot fix a weak one.
  - Aegaeus10111 8y ago
    True. But you might as well say the same about an umbrella not keeping mosquitoes away. UI design doesn't involve BE design in any way. So?
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      So you are saying UI is not involved in the most important measure of quality of a retail site - that is the point, and the answer to your "so?" (though, personally, I would not make the distinction as stark as you have, here.)
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  UI redesigns frequently are primarily about aesthetics. You don't have to completely redesign your site to redesign your search.
  - 8y ago

pdonis 8y ago

> Visual design quality does have an impact. A negative one, based on what you quote: "This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing." Which seems to be saying that the uglier you make your UI, the better your chances of having actual usability issues surface.

Mtinie 8y ago
This is the reason design isn’t a simple concept. The non-aesthetic portions of the effort (contextual and ethnographic research, information architecture, general usability, workflows, requirement generation, etc.) need to be done just so those warts can be exposed. After the fundamentals are solid it’s then important to apply appropriate aesthetic and interactive elements to polish the experience. Simply jumping to visual design after skipping the fundamentals is nearly assuring a failure. It would be akin to worrying about performance and scaling of product’s database and API without first considering if the data schemas and underlying technology stack even meet the operational needs. Addendum: “Evolutionary design” instead of “revolutionary design” is typically preferred if one would like to keep a connection between how something was done before and the (hopefully) improved version.

rarecoil 8y ago

> I've seen many redesigns and that tends not to be something people do—there's usually a good bump in visual quality in the process. So really, the important point is that you can gain affordances for usability sins if you have a design that is appealing to people as modern or otherwise trendy. By the same process: if you have a design that was 100% usable, then redesign and end up making usability mistakes, there's a good chance you'll see net-zero or negative from the prettier UI in your testing. For the majority of companies that do not have focus groups, usability labs, and a design staff that can spend cycles on R&D, it seems you may be better off doing little more than reskinning existing UI controls to maintain trendiness than full-scale re-wires of your existing product at any time to maximize the aesthetic-usability effect for minimal design work. Examples you cite in a sibling comment have cash to burn on exactly this, however I think that is the exception rather than the norm for businesses at large. Visual (aesthetic) design change buys goodwill, reinforces and differentiates brand image, but IMO is mostly a marketing tool at the end of the day. I see product design and visual design as sister disciplines that must communicate, similar to two people running a three-legged race, but it is easy to improve one or the other separately from the other in most iterative scenarios. Large-scale redesigns are usually risky, and Snapchat's a great high-profile example of a company that was able to hire talent and let that process go off the rails.

mrighele 8y ago

> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. On the other side, it will be less usable while i have to relearn how to use it. This is not an issue if it happens from time to time, you pay upfront a decrease of productivity and will be rewarded greatly later on. But in the era of SaaS we are constantly subject to a stream of redesigns, sometimes small, other times global. You cannot finish adapting to a change that another comes. I don't know about others, but for me is deeply frustrating.

speedplane 8y ago
I don't mind functional UI updates (e.g., adding a search bar, when previously you had to scroll). But design changes are made simply for design purposes by big-tech companies are frustrating because when they do an update, it puts pressure on everyone else to follow their design to avoid looking out of date. For example, just a few months ago, Google used square rectangles for the search bar, and advocated "cards" with sharp corners in their material design standards. However, just recently, they updated gmail and google search to use rounded rectangles in the search bar instead of rectangles. Are rectangles better or worse than rounded rectangles? Yes? No? The answer is, it doesn't matter for usability. But because Google is so big and has such influence, now, if your site uses a rectangular search bar with sharp corners users will perceive it as "dated". There are many similar examples of this. Microsoft's metro UI was cool and popular for maybe a full 6 months. Clean Helvetica font was everyone's aspiration, then Google pushed Lato, and now it's Robato, until they change their mind again. Small 11pt font used to be the norm, then very large readable 14pt font was the norm, and now we're back to something like 12pt. Single page applications a while ago were avoided, then became so popular they were effectively a pre-requisite, and now they should only be used "where appropriate". I think Google make these changes not to make their site look good and refreshing, but to make everyone else's look old and dated.
- hopler 8y ago
  Round rects are better. Apple established that 30 years ago. Sharp corners are a fad that Microsoft(!) started with Windows Phone/10 just to be different from Apple (their chronic problem of trying to compete by doing randomly different things) and the Googlee going for it with cards, before they realized rounded rects are preferred for a reason. (And cards, what an innovation, copying the original desktop application GUI language from cascading/tiling window systems and HyperCard

Aeolun 8y ago

In my experience, only about 40% of redesigns actually are a visual upgrade. All the others are just a visual change. Visual changes are irrelevant at best, and actively harmful at worst. By all means, improve the website and the design, but actually improve it.

deepstream 8y ago

Funny thing about AUE is that it hides usability issues. People get dazzled by the look, and feel it's better than it is. This means the OP is correct. New paint doesn't make it more useful. To really help users, optimize for usable design, not just aesthetics.

aclissold 8y ago
Why not both?
- bloomer 8y ago
  Limited time and resources
  - calinet6 8y ago
    There is a balance. If aesthetics are a limiting factor, as determined by research, then they’re worth improving.

magicalhippo 8y ago

> Main principle you want to look up: the Aesthetic Usability Effect. Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. Well that explains a few things. Many a time have I experienced a UI remake looking great but being absolutely horrible to use. Take for example Google+, where they tried a last ditch effort to make it more popular by doing a UI update. They made it look really slick, but in the process made it much, much worse to actually use. I used to be an active G+ user (yeah, I know) but after they forced me to use the new UI I stopped using it, it was that bad. Another example is Acronis TrueImage, which completely redid their UI, making it much more visually pleasing and up-to-date. Initially I thought it was great, but then I noticed that certain processes were a lot more tedious to do, and they'd also removed a lot of functionally in the process.

maxhallinan 8y ago

How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect account for the success of websites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, classic Reddit, and LinkedIn, to name a few? There seems to be no correlation between aesthetic quality and use of these sites. I'm not sure what that indicates about the "usability" of these sites. If the goal is to maximize the number of users, it would seem that there is some evidence that a sense of usability determined by aesthetic quality is not that important.

Retra 8y ago
People aren't using those sites because of their UIs, but because of the content they offer. UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor.
- logifail 8y ago
  > UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor. Necessary for what (or for whom)?
  - Retra 8y ago
    A UI is necessary for users to use your product. That doesn't mean the UI is your product.
deleted 8y ago
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username223 8y ago
I know this will never happen, but it would be interesting to see the percentage of Reddit users who took the time to opt out of the new "improved" interface. I suspect that number is small, because most people have learned to just quietly sigh and accept random UI changes, but larger than the Reddit UI team would care to admit.
- gwern 8y ago
  If you are a moderator of a reasonably popular subreddit, you can find out by checking the traffic statistics which breaks out old vs new! For example, for my little link-sharing subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/) : https://imgur.com/a/sUcEQeQ https://imgur.com/a/sUcEQeQ You can see a large fraction of the users have taken the time to optout, perhaps as much as a third (!) of those who can. Considering how passive most users are, this tells me that the new & expensive Reddit design is indeed loathed.

ftio 8y ago

I come bearing anecdata! At my previous company, we did a minor visual design refresh of our ancient software because our sales data showed that one of the top objections cited by prospects was that the software looked old. Although the visual design refresh did nothing for usability, it completely eliminated that objection and enabled our sales team to focus on how our software could improve our customers’ businesses and why it was better than our competitors’. The redesign improved conversion rates. The redesign caused a bit of consternation among existing customers, but they got over it quickly. It had no observable effect on retention/churn. If you were a PM on my team unable to substantiate why the work you’re scheduling helps the business (by making life better for customers or by reducing purchasing friction), you wouldn’t be on my team for long. These pointless redesigns are amateur-hour stuff. Of course, there are other legitimate reasons to do a redesign, like maintainability and developer retention/happiness, but those are much riskier and even more difficult to justify.

zzzcpan 8y ago

> Users are more tolerant of __minor__ usability issues Let's be honest, aesthetic-usability effect is too insignificant to ever prioritize aesthetics over usability and pretty much no company in the world can benefit from it. It's just a justification for producing pretty looking interfaces with awful UX, because UX is hard, a typical designer on the market likely can't even do it and eye candy is more easily sellable in hierarchical organizations, where everyone can impress their bosses all the way to the top.

ThomPete 8y ago

Ive done this for more than 20 years too and i dont think the article is as wrong as you seem to think. In general designers seem to think that design is a much more important aapect than it actually is. Sucessful redesigns arent about improving the percieved value or respect the work outside your own department. They are about solving specific problems that hinder business to be optimal. When you start asking people to respect your work as a blanket statement, you lose mine.

werber 8y ago

UI !== UX, without the research side it is kinda pointless. I'm not sure if the point of the article was to say that but it's what I read

Theodores 8y ago
Thank goodness someone has chimed in with this. The original article has no mention of UX. UI developers are getting marched out the door at a well known publisher right now, their services no longer needed. UX is a different story with this mystery publisher, they now get to call a lot of the shots. There is a bigger discussion to be had regarding the whole visual design process. In 2006 when you could have your navigation in any corner of the screen with any design for the search icon it made sense to have UI designers add their special flourishes. Now we know where the navigation goes and what the icon is for search, that has all been settled. User experience still needs some people to take care of it as we can't leave that up to the programmers, can we?

christophilus 8y ago

I do tend to avoid sites that look too old. But I also avoid sites that are too slow. I'm no longer a Gmail user for this reason, for example, and I'm only a Reddit user because (thank God) there's still old.reddit.com. Can I just advocate for one thing? Make performance the #1 priority of any redesign (or at least a very, very high priority).

cousin_it 8y ago
When designers try to justify themselves, they commit many sins, but performance problems are usually due to programmers trying to justify themselves.

Waterluvian 8y ago

The fundamental challenge I have with UX and UX people is that there's clearly a lot of really important, useful stuff in the discipline, mixed with a lot of nonsense. And I've been burned a few times by those who tell a good story to susceptible executives and utterly waste time and resources to justify their own existence. I wish there were better resources for non UX people like me to learn how to tell the difference.

werber 8y ago
When UX veers away from research and data it gets nasty. I think the situation you're describing is something that happens when their isn't full buy in from the stake holders on the value of that research
azhenley 8y ago
What you describe is true in any area, including software developers. You could just start learning about UX. It’ll make you a better engineer!
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I think you're partly right that it is true in any area. But I don't think it's equally true in every area, and I think that UX lends itself a bit more to subjective artsyness than software development. But I generally agree with your sentiment; you can absolutely find "just trust me" in software development. You can also probably smell it out better by learning about it more.
  - azhenley 8y ago
    If you do want to stay away from the “artsy” side, search for “usability engineering” and “interaction design”. You’ll find a lot more about empirically driven methods to evaluate your UI, mostly from a productivity perspective. I personally find it fascinating!
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    > more to subjective artsyness than software development. You would think so, but the amount of 'developer superstition' and and 'gut feeling' I've faced in development is quite high.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. Of course perception and reality are different things. And I imagine that effect is only really true for, at best, some slight statistical majority. Certainly I know a lot of people who've stuck with older versions of software because it looks and works like they've come to expect, and I myself tend to judge the usability of new software by how much it looks like a Win95 application. The thing I love most about only developing software for in-house use (because my company doesn't sell software) is that nobody really cares what it looks like.

doodpants 8y ago

> Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a guy who owns a computer and uses software. Most GUI redesigns I've seen in the past 10 years make the interface prettier, but LESS usable. The new design usually incoroporates three categories of changes: 1. Lists of items are rendered in a larger font with more spacing between items, leading to lower information density, thus requiring more scrolling. (For bonus points, often a window that has a scrollable area isn't resizable, so you're stuck with whatever arbitrary viewport size the designer decided was large enough.) 2. Controls that used to always be visible are now hidden until you hover or click the right spot. This is done to reduce "clutter", as though controls are somehow graffiti. 3. A bunch of convenient shortcuts enjoyed by long-time power users weren't reimplimented in the new design, because the designer didn't know about them, or simply didn't think they mattered. I have a WordPress blog. WordPress recently overhauled their entire editing UI, and I hate it. When I started the blog several years ago, I was able to figure out how to use WordPress by exploring the UI. The new UI is an extreme example of #2; when you go to write a new post, the page is entirely blank. You have to click somewhere to get a text cursor, and there isn't even a visually delineated text area before you do so. There are a couple of features I had to hunt around for, and I wouldn't have even known those features existed if I hadn't learned them from the old UI, which presented them front and center. My company uses JIRA for bug tracking. They switched to a new GUI a while back, and I hate it. It's harder to find things that used to be presented front and center. And as an example of #3: It used to be possible to just type an issue number like "392" in the search box, hit Enter, and be brought immediately to that issue page. Not anymore; if you do that quickly, you get a "no results found" page. If you type the number and then wait a couple of seconds, you get a list of search results, which you can then click on. Pressing Enter then takes you to the first one, but often that is NOT issue #392, it's just some issue that happens to have the text "392" somewhere in it. So you have to eyeball the search results, and then click the right one. The old way was more convenient. Fortunately, I eventually found the preference to switch back to the old GUI, which they helpfully give you because they apparently realize that the new GUI sucks. (I don't know offhand if it reverts the search behavior, because I've already changed my habits to not use it anymore.)

Spooky23 8y ago

People aren’t idiots, but reinventing the front end is like starting over and needs to be done in one fell swoop. Usually that means redesign on the quick which always equals missed features. The classic example is when everyone jumped on responsive web design. Many applications and sites ended up including 80% of the elements of the desktop page and dropping other elements. Like my bank, who eliminated the ability to see your routing number and account number.

naasking 8y ago

> In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Did you read the article? The author specifically says, "Before all of the UI designers that read this go out and riot and champion against me for saying UI redesigns are a waste of time, let me say that I do value design. I think at the bare minimum, a product or website needs to be usable, and if you possess a good eye and steady hand, you should feel compelled to create something that looks pleasing." He then goes on to say, "Just stop redesigning the UI all the time. UI redesigns, in my opinion, are a waste of time 95% of the time. Let me explain further." That's not so contentious IMO. Redesigns can be too frequent and the purported purpose of redesigns is typically nebulous, and can be driven more by politics than any of the objective metrics that you describe. > People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Of course they have reasons. That doesn't make those reasons objectively correct. Maybe you should try to understand and respect the point the article is trying to convey, that perhaps the pendulum on UI redesign has swung a little too far one way.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> That doesn't make those reasons objectively correct. You don't even need to appeal to some 'objective correct' standard. You can just look more basically at "what is the purpose?" Usually, it's "increase sales". So... determine baseline metrics, perhaps implement some testing to see what changes have what effect, and then push forward a larger redesign effort if the tests moved towards the goal/purpose. Perhaps the goal is 'reduce number of clicks'. Is that really important? Or is it 'reduce user frustration'? How will you measure that? "Reduce page load time" - should be pretty easy to measure, but will it have an impact on other things (sales, support, etc)? People may have 'good reasons' for a redesign. Without a measurable goal, they're a waste of time, imo, and I've often seen them do more harm than good (measurable harm, like reduced sales, customer drop off, etc). But hey - those front page pictures looked really nice in the photoshop mockups sent over...
js2 8y ago
> Did you read the article? Please don’t do this. > Maybe you should try to understand Or this. Reminder: be civil, don’t be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AsyncAwait 8y ago

> Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. This seems like a call to seniority. Just because you've been there for X more years doesn't make your input automatically more valid. I get his disclaimer i.e. 'I am not a designer', but yours just feels a bit like bragging.

tootie 8y ago

Last place I worked did a skunkworks redesign project in their primary e-commerce site and A/B tested it against the existing site (which was perfectly decent) and recorded a consistently higher conversion rate. They could easily put an 8-figure value on the redesign which cost in the high 6-figures to design and implement.

conanbatt 8y ago

> People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Building respect across those boundaries is a rare and valuable thing. I wouldn't frame it this way, but there are many confounding things in measuring a change in the UI design. I jumped from web consumer to operations, and the mindset is so different: in web, you have shallow actions that you want things to be easier and look aesthetically pleasing. In operations you want deep actions that require reliability or learning, and that require every or many users to do it, changing the UI is a nightmare for them. It has to be vastly better to compensate the change. And not only that, you need your operations to be more efficient than your competition: a bad ui can cause issues in an entire company. In consumer-web, pages like reddit changes their entire UI to have posts read in the same page and its use-it or lose-it. Consumer web cruises along the monopolistic positions they have to spend resources without visible consequence. Who cares if reddit's ui is 10% snazzier or 10% snappier? It's not like the reddit user will stop using it because of it. That redesign happened in a company that raised half a billion dollars.

bobblywobbles 8y ago

You sparked a lot of comments in this post. Thank you for explaining these concepts to me, I have not heard of the aesthetic usability effect. I will read into this as I am curious what it is now. To be clear, I do value design. I think design is important and I write that out in the article that I value design. What I struggle to value are redesigns, that is, complete redesigns of a UI - instead preferring incremental updates of the UX that is necessary to use the product or application. Thank you for the work that you've done, as I'm sure you have had a great impact on the customers you've directly and indirectly served. Continue to do design, because if it were up to me, nothing would look good at all. Cheers.

sh87 8y ago

As a user I have not come across any good 'visual' redesign. On the contrary, it annoys me. Immensely; when the fking redesign replaces my known problems for unknown ones. As an example, as contractors, we fill up timesheets very often. Our company decided to move to another 'aesthetically pleasing' platform which to me as a user is same as a redesign. Now the click - tab - 8 - tab - space - cmd+w ritual is taken away. It now goes like this : load page - login - click link - click a drop down - wait for it to timeout (dont even ask me why) - click again and wait for the dropdown to populate and close itself - click again - select - click - 8 - click save - find the mini'x' - click - select another dropdown - click submit (no, space no longer works on this form). This new platform has more options, more whitespace, more corporate colors. Agreed. No colors, whitespace your redesign could add will soothe the agony of poor usability.