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Users hate change

• qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
  I did not like the change from old reddit to new reddit. Remember Digg v 1.0 to 2.0 and how it made it sink?
  • andygates 7y ago
    New Reddit remains slow, which engendered badwill. New Twitter, on the other hand, messes up its primary product - the users' feed - to give unfollowed content. It breaks the idea that the user is curating their personal feed, and that is problematic. But it's fast and acceptably customizable.
  • justbaker 7y ago
    >Remember Digg v 1.0 to 2.0 and how it made it sink? I do -- Digg absolutely disappeared overnight. I almost forgot about it entirely but the phrase "digg it" reminded me of it.
  • pwenzel 7y ago
    I am still clinging to the old Reddit design. I also am still on Mac OSX Sierra. Yeah.
  • brianpgordon 7y ago
    You can still run old Reddit! It works the same as always. Props to them for acknowledging the cantankerousness of their older users and continuing to support the classic design. I think Reddit would implode with nerd rage if they just dropped it given the state of the new design a couple of years ago.
• codingdave 7y ago
  This article is correct, but you can take it to a higher level of abstraction. All change is interpreted by how it impacts the individual. The article laid out one possible scenario where this results in bad will. But it is broader than that. It is broader than product design. If you look at the people in your world, and think about how they will react to a change, you'll get a picture of how a change will come across, whether that is a product change, a process change, an organizational change, etc. At the end of it all, it boils down to empathy - the more you can think about change in the context of how it impacts specific people, the better you'll be able to manage it.
• tmikaeld 7y ago
  I just think of Microsoft when I read these. Every time they change something in Windows, they never take the old thing away but instead keep both. Which means there's a myriad of ways to get to the control panel. And there's multiple variants of the control panel UI... Outlook is another good example, there's 3 different UI's where we can add/remove accounts. Result: New users use the new (default) UI, old users use the old UI, admins use what's quickest.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Agreed. The end result may be that Windows 8 and 10 are inconsistent UI-wise, but it's also the only reason I'm not really angry at them - because I know that if I can't do something in the new, dumb, infantilized UI, I can always do it in the traditional, pre-Windows 8 UI.
  • nemacol 7y ago
    The real kick in the beans from MS is the new UI lacks anything beyond basic functionality in the new UI. For example, Win10 (1803) Mouse settings you can modify: Left/Right handed, Scroll Wheel lines, Scroll inactive windows when you hover. For every other change you have to click "Additional mouse options" and are taken to the old UI. MS Win10, and to a lesser extent Server 2016-19 has increased the number of clicks it takes me to get to the thing dramatically. In 7 I relied heavily on the search feature - it was wonderful to type "Programs and" hit enter and get to the page I want. Today they have hidden (in win10) those old UI screens. It is frustrating. I would accept the new UI if it had feature parity, but it can't even perform the most basic tasks (mouse pointer speed for example). Edit - Spelling.
    • ChrisSD 7y ago
      The old mouse UI is due to third party software that adds their own interface on top of it. Microsoft do want to move away from it but they don't want to break backwards compatibility.
    • bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
      Feature parity
• flohofwoe 7y ago
  My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to 'keep the team busy'. Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the "maintenance surface" becomes bigger and bigger. What should happen of course is that the product's feature set is frozen at the "peak version", and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that's a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and "software as a service" which they like so much. From the customer's point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don't add any value, right? Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the 'average customer' (which doesn't exist btw) isn't pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.
  • dade_ 7y ago
    There should be an award of shame for this and I nominate Visio 2003.
    • Finnucane 7y ago
      Word for Dos 5.0. If you are old like me, you may remember thinking this was a pretty good word processor, and when Word 6.0 came out, it seemed a bloated mess in comparison. It's been downhill ever since. Mac OS X 10.6.8. It was good, and stable, and nothing that has come after has really added value to the product.
      • vbezhenar 7y ago
        iOS 6. I'm using latest iOS and the only useful feature for me is fingerprint recognition and that is more about hardware. They added tons of new features but I wouldn't miss any of those features.
• empath75 7y ago
  This is just curmudgeonliness backed by nothing at all. You probably shouldn't do major redesigns with no real benefit to the user (I'm looking at you, reddit), but if you're adding or improving functionality, then feel free to incrementally improve your site constantly. People will get used to constant small improvements and will miss them if they stop. Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's not "curmudgeonliness", it's the real deal. And the article makes your point, but in different words. Adding stuff itself doesn't disturb anything. But if the added stuff interferes with existing features in any way - including UI friction and performance degradation - people are gonna get angry ("badwill" will be created). Doubly so if you start removing features. It's important point to keep repeating, because accumulation of badwill doesn't show in the telemetry, so data-obsessed companies don't get it.
  • dgzl 7y ago
    I agree with you in general, but I think you're missing a subset of users who can keep up with smaller incremental changes but specifically don't, which over time can eventually make them feel lost. This describes my relationship with Facebook. I've always generally understood how Facebook works and used to be a power-user. Over time as the new little features didn't apply to me, I found that my own interest had been crowded out and the environment felt entirely different, which further pushed me away. At this point I have very little confidence in my ability and understanding of Facebook.
  • shawndrost 7y ago
    "Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy." How does this square with the overwhelmingly negative early responses to facebook's news feed, or reactions? Would you characterize them as "arbitrary"? I use those as examples because they now seem widely loved, so they seem like good (non-arbitrary) design to me, but they were poorly received.
• Rainymood 7y ago
  I love how the author shouts from the rooftops the following >This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric (...) While this whole post reeks with entitlement and egocentrism - but from his perspective, so that is OK! To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger user base than himself and only thinks about his benefit and how the changes affect him and how he uses the product. >Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the vague and nebulous future. This is simply not true. Depending on what you buy (a physical product like a bike) or a software subscription (like photoshop), you get those upgrades whether you want it or not. You don't want it? Then DONT BUY THE PRODUCT. Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don't like it? You go to the freaking competitor! I understand the authors frustrations but customers have the ultimate final say in anything by voting with their wallet.
  • flohofwoe 7y ago
    ...with most big software products, you can't really "vote with your wallet", because they have a monopoly. They may even have "earned" that monopoly status because once a long time ago they were really good, and this was the reason they became successful. But there's a certain type of mediocre-yet-charismatic people (call them bullshitters), which attach to such successful products like leeches, and the downward spiral begins.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger user base than himself and only thinks about his benefit and how the changes affect him and how he uses the product. I disagree. "Users hate change" is a meme that's generally accepted in the industry; the post applies empathy to dig into the reasons why it seems that "users hate change". > Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don't like it? You go to the freaking competitor! "Voting with your wallet" in a non-commodity market doesn't work. Doubly so if we're talking about complex products with complex feature sets, making each essentially an unique animal. Triply so if the "feature" of "not mindlessly messing with the UI/featureset" is impossible to predict ahead of time.
• _nalply 7y ago
  My wife has handicaps (deaf and cerebral palsy). She gets nervous and mistrustful if something has changed. She hates updates and asked me why the companies can't let the software alone. She has a point. Updates and nagging dialogs have a cost which is higher for non-IT people. Imagine your old neighbor being confused if he should allow that update or not and being stressed about because these update requests don't stop coming in.
  • redbeard0x0a 7y ago
    The best analogy of finished software I have heard is this: > Software is done, like mowing the lawn is done. We live in an imperfect world, if we want to keep ourselves safe and prevent bad actors out of our data/technology. Updates are a part of the process. You don't mow your lawn once, it has to be maintained. Which is the same as software. This is something that we would be all better for if we could teach this concept to everybody so that updates are just a normal part of life.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      Updates aren't a normal part of life though, they sometimes happen to break your system because they introduce bugs. There's a calculation of perceived probability of trouble because of updating vs expected gain from the update.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      That's conflating maintenance with change. There are really two distinct types of updates - one that's patching up security holes and ensures the software keeps running on modern systems; the other adds and removes features. They ought to be distinct. The lawn analogy is not apt, because software left alone does not change at all. It's one of the most stable things in the universe. The environment changes, slowly, and at some point adaptations are needed.
      • compiler-guy 7y ago
        Even adding features is fine (and to a lesser extent, removing them), as long as you don't change the workflow users depend on.
• mung 7y ago
  Adobe should read this and understand it. Veteran users of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign get updates that change the default way of doing something and they don’t even provide a UI to change back. Don’t fix long-standing bugs, just change something that didn’t need changing. That and the major performance downgrades to support unwanted features.
• emilfihlman 7y ago
  This resonates with me so damn well. I've witnessed multiple absolutely idiotic changes that completely disregard user experience because Change.
  • GrumpyNl 7y ago
    Like the new twitter layout in a browser.
    • Avamander 7y ago
      I hate it, it breaks loading a lot of Tweets for me, it also wastes a lot of screen space for some stupid reason on my wide monitors. I just hate it.
• vasili111 7y ago
  The most important downside for me of website/software UI redesign is that I already know where to look for what I am looking for. For example, reddit, I am comfortable with old design and do not want to spend my time on exploring new design, I do not want to spend time on it because I have lot of other things to spend my time on.
• bla3 7y ago
  I've seen many UI rollouts that carefully track user happiness metrics. All UI changes have in common that user happiness goes down for a short time after the change -- but for good changes, it goes back up and to an even higher level than before. So it's expected that right after a change people are unhappy, which is where Nielsen's (sensible) suggestion comes from. The problem is of course that UX designers get so used to dismissing that initial criticism that they sometimes dismiss valid criticism that leads to long-term user unhappiness as well.
  • panic 7y ago
    How do you know your metrics actually measure user happiness?
• johnday 7y ago
  It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they don't really care. People originally balked at the reactions feature, calling it gauche and unnecessary - but now people use it as part of the language of the platform without a second thought. Compare with Twitter. Every UI "overhaul" they've ever done has been received in a hugely negative way. The only change which has been remotely successful was the 140/280 switch. The difference is threefold: First, Twitter's UI changes have been big. They skip over incremental changes and go straight for gigantic overhauls. This requires people re-learn the language of the site completely every couple of years. Second, these changes have invariably been coupled with user-hostile design decisions. The obvious one this time round is the automatic switching to "AI sorted timeline" on every visit. No wonder people have an almost pavlovian response to the design changes. And thirdly, while Facebook's changes are usually to accommodate changing usage patterns, new features, or new hardware, Twitter's updates are very transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience for any sector of the market. Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place. Gosh I didn't expect this to be such a long rant. Turns out I have a lot to say about the terrible design decisions made over in Twitter land. The conclusion is this: people don't hate change. They hate change which makes their lives worse than the status quo would have done. It's not complicated.
  • mschuster91 7y ago
    > Twitter's updates are very transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience for any sector of the market. The only improvement seems to be that the new UI supports multiple accounts - something which I solve by using different Chrome profiles, much safer.
    • johnday 7y ago
      The old UI also supported multiple accounts, and quite well. Now I wouldn't know where to click.
• xwdv 7y ago
  New incoming users love change, it can sometimes be the reason they even came to your platform. Always remember the user you serve.
• Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I really, really, really like Snow Leopard[1], but there are a some features they’ve added that I really like, such as autosaving, fullscreen, and word lookup. I’d still go back to Snow Leopard if I could, I don’t quite agree Apple has added nothing of value. There are things I would miss. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224370
• mschuster91 7y ago
  Guess this is related to the abomination called "new Twitter UI". While the redesign is an abomination, with Twitter especially there is another thing in play: they do not listen to or consult their users in any way, no matter if ordinary users or third party app developers. Third party developers want to be able to use all the features available on the platform - especially when it comes to DMs, polls and media. But Twitter has locked down all that stuff and introduced ridiculous rate limits on that what remains open - to the point that writing a full featured client is not worth the time any more. Users want to get rid of harrassment - the calls of "Twitter, ban the f...ing Nazis" are years old. Instead, Twitter still doesn't even allow banning quote-tweeting - meaning, a large account quote-tweets a small-ish account and the followers of the large account then dog-pile on the quoted tweet. Mass flagging exploits automated AI filters leading to (especially) sex workers being automatically banned, with next to zero accountability for Twitter and sometimes requiring court orders. But instead of working on real pain points like the ones I just described, Twitter rather works away silently on a crap design, forces it onto their users overnight and doesn't even give an option to opt out or to submit feedback. Of course users feel like they're being treated like shit.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• donclark 7y ago
  Why not allow users to toggle btwn versions of software/UI/etc?
  • yoz-y 7y ago
    Because in many cases this is not possible. For example when Twitter added polls no other client than the default one was able to display them. If they kept some older version around they would not have feature parity. Then they introduced threads, these would look weird. Now imagine if they introduced nesting, the database model could change in a way that all older versions would require a substantial update. Maintaining an older version may very well mean maintaining two products and two synced versions of the database. Now you have doubled your engineering cost.
    • aeorgnoieang 7y ago
      It would probably be only marginally more expensive (for Twitter specifically) for them to add changes in a way that's backwards compatible with older clients, so I don't think this argument is particularly convincing. I think, because it's somewhat plausible, they pushed it, but because they really wanted to control all of the clients, to increase their advertising revenue.
• Causality1 7y ago
  I'll add to the OP that implementing new features isn't the only reason change happens. Many developers and marketers have a fetish for change for the sake of change. There have been many times when a product I use has undergone a redesign, except along with a visual redesign most of its features took twice as long to access. Information that was available with one click now required two or three.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    There are several XDDs that drive this; fad, resume, and other driven-development methodologies. "Implemented site in X" may not help either users or operators, but may advance the developer's career. Or evenmerely provide the developer the impression it might.
• MockObject 7y ago
  iTunes hasn't been intuitive to me in ages. Every update in the past 10 years has made it more confusing.
• zzzcpan 7y ago
  > Secondly: Your change probably isn't for the better. Not for me, not for the majority of existing customers. Things could be much worse. When the change suddenly prevents users from doing X, something they invested all that time, attention and effort to be able to do all without an option to change back. All software where updates are controlled by a party that develops it is at constant risk of becoming a piece of junk for and frustrating at least some of its users or most or all of them. In comparison it's not that big of a deal if software is a new competing alternative, like Wayland for example. If it breaks lots of use cases for existing users it will simply not get anywhere, only fragment ecosystem a bit with new niches.
• jhallenworld 7y ago
  Developers also hate change, unless it's their own change.
  • aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    Of course it depends on the nature of the specific change. I'm sure lots of developers really appreciate bug fixes, especially for bugs they've encountered, let alone developed workarounds or patches. But there's a reason (really, lots of reasons) why it's a great idea to pin one's third-party dependencies. Change is, at least, costly; at beast trivially so (but never literally nothing).
• wstuartcl 7y ago
  I agree 100%. In my view every change you make to your software (that is not a bug fix) is just as likley to reduce the perceived value for your current customers as to increase it. Spread these changes over time and you segment the customer base across different states of pleased and unhappy. Naturally as the customer base denormalizes against any given state affinity you reduce the overall population's feelings about your app. IMHO this is one of the hardest problems to solve with long lived applications. What changes can be made, what features can be added or changed and what "look and feel" changes can be made without tilting the affinity of the current users vs expanding the value proposition for new ones.
• wrs 7y ago
  >when you have a product that works, and an existing customer base - freeze it. ... simply leave the product the way it is, bar minor BAU and bug-fix work. Instead devote effort into building a new, next-generation product ... As a counterexample, Apple did this with Final Cut Pro and suffered years of criticism from customers for “abandoning” their installed base. Of course, being Apple, they didn’t seem to care. :) The new version eventually got to parity and beyond, but in the meantime people were seriously unhappy (and I’m sure many still are). People don’t like change, and people also don’t like being abandoned.
• ken 7y ago
  Some corollaries: Upgrading from v1 to v2 of your product is no different than migrating from your product to your competitor's product, except you probably have better compatibility. If your competitors offer good-enough compatibility, or you break backwards compatibility, even this advantage is lost. Just as with data structures, we should build software itself as generally immutable. The successor to version X, in most cases, is version Y of something else. The exception seems to be filling out features. If your v1 is good but sparse, then adding missing features is an obvious win for users, too. That means, though, that you need to publish your roadmap. Customers can't plan around arbitrary releases and mystery features.
• bibyte 7y ago
  I think there shouldn't be change in a software project just for the sake of change. It should be okay to just maintain a project without changing major parts of it. Unfortunately there are some projects that just go the opposite way. Major UI changes every few months just for the sake of it. As for myself I am not opposed to changes, but only when it's meaningful.
• ptero 7y ago
  I take a view in between of the quoted article and the video it criticizes. There are costs to changes. The key, to me, whether those changes are outweighed by functionality improvement, as on average perceived by users. There will always be folks who do not like the change, but if the majority of the users like new functionality (maybe after a bit of griping), or most strong advocates among users love it, this is probably a change for the better. Unfortunately, many software changes are done without bringing the benefit for the users (e.g., "we are switching to framework/model X, so UX is now different; deal with it"). Those changes are pretty hard to justify. Not always impossible (e.g., you may have reached the limits of older design and have to spend a lot on devops, etc.), but hard and for those cases the company should bend over backwards to minimize pain for users. My 2c.
• dfps 7y ago
  Yes, but users will accept it and be satisfied if the change is good. How manu of us have tools we continue to use (or long for when using alternatives) because they worked so well. Most tech seems to ignore usability, though. Samsung galaxy updates suck. Korg Electribe rules.
• monkin 7y ago
  People don't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them are lazy, and don't want to change their habits, no matter how bad they are. I know from my experience, that most valuable users will contact you directly (e-mail, support, twitter, other way) to describe their experiences before and after the change, telling you what exactly hurts them. Rest of them are pointless trolls with "First Comment Rule". What is that? First negative comment will spark negative discussion, so trolls spark them to pressure on company/product. There is a lot of companies that will write, "I am sorry", and will start to move backwards because of that. How to live with that? Listen, adapt, yet don't care about everything or everyone. :)
  • tabtab 7y ago
    Re: People don't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them are lazy Changes often don't solve anything of significance, just reshuffle stuff to be different or to be "cool". When you deal with dozens of apps and applications a day, having to relearn a UI is an annoyance. Take the MS-Office "ribbon" change. Perhaps it may improve newbie learning a rough guess of 15%, but those of us who got used to the existing tool-bar by rote memorization were slowed for a few months. The ribbon changed one arbitrariness for another arbitrariness from our perspective. I can point out several irrationalities in the ribbon.
• csense 7y ago
  If Facebook had read this in 2006, I'd still use it every day.
• infinity0 7y ago
  At Google years ago, the UX designers coined the term "change aversion" and used it in exactly this arrogant way that this article is talking about. They even used this concept to dismiss the empirical results of UX experiments that they themselves conducted with regular users, that indicated this effect. Lol how do I science? This resulted in lots of internal memes mocking these UX designers. Totally agree with everything this article says, fuck arrogant UX designers coming into my office and rearranging my workspace, fuck you coming into my house and rearranging my furniture. (If you attempt to justify this by "it's not your product it's the company's", you are really missing the point, and you shouldn't be a UX designer. Human emotions don't care about legal structures.)
  • brianpgordon 7y ago
    Does anyone know if this organizational dissonance still exists at Google? I'd really like to think that there are Googlers on the inside who appropriately appalled by GMail. With the latest redesign I literally decided that it was worth $5/mo of my money to pay Fastmail so that I wouldn't have to endure GMail anymore.
• SomeHacker44 7y ago
  > The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off that I'll move, no matter what the cost. This is why I gave up my iPhone X. I just hated constantly re-learning Apple's new paradigm du-jour, and I absolutely loathed FaceID and the notch. Now I have a OnePlus 7 Pro, with "Touch ID" and no notch, and except for some friends occasionally saying "why are you not blue" I am happy as a clam. I never want a "Face ID" and I never want a "notch." (I don't care about bezels, etc.) Now, I'm considering dropping the rest of Apple from my life, after a 15 year Apple-only lifestyle. It's really the "touch bar," when all I really want is an ESC key and real F keys, and the fact that I have to repair my laptop every six months because some key or other is broken again. And, it's not even a "wait 20 minutes while we replace the keyboard" but more of a "wait a few days to a week" and god hope they don't charge you $700. Ridiculous.
  • egorfine 7y ago
    Getting rid of F keyboard is a major fuckup from Apple. I am very far of suggesting that they don't know what they do, but I am yet to see a software developer happy with the Touch Bar - after all these years.
• chadlavi 7y ago
  that's an incredibly expensive and complex way to avoid some friction for some users. What about breaking changes to APIs? Do you end up with two completely separate backends and DBs to maintain as well? Do you just completely clone your entire product every time a big change happens -- and do you hire enough new people to handle that work? Probably not, you probably just stretch existing engineers too far to maintain old stuff. Seems better to only introduce breaking behavior changes when they're really necessary, and move the entire product to the new design. And if a new feature or a change in nav is enough to lose you customers, then your product might not be that compelling in the first place.
• oneepic 7y ago
  You know, a lot of users would be more ok with change if it was demoed to them first, or given a heads-up, or they were given an opportunity to give feedback that co's actually use, and improve the product. A lot of people I know would say something to the effect of, "[Google/Microsoft/Apple/other co] can fly me out and have me test every product. I'll do it for free." Just because the practice of forced system updates and breaking changes is so god damn frustrating and it happens so often. Back when I worked in medical software, it fucked up doctors' and nurses' workflow very, very badly for a whole workday (could be anywhere from 8-24+ hours), and it might stay the same way for years. Because even if they tell us to revert it, it's so low on our priority list that it just stays there forever. Users can complain forever and nothing will change because we refuse to prioritize the very thing they're asking for. Tech co's don't really have a satisfying answer to this issue IMO. The most we do is bring in a few people off the street every few months to test the whole system, but usually we seem to just say "LG2M" when another engineer on the team says it should be fine. That's an engineer, not a user. You won't get quality feedback. I guess when you keep telling new engineers some dark shit like, "Users don't know what they want", your industry will get pretty callous to its customer base.
• gridlockd 7y ago
  > "This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric, as well as being wrong-headed on several counts." From a user's perspective, perhaps. That doesn't make it incorrect, however. > "Firstly: humans don't resist change when it's something that they asked for, they resist things being imposed upon them against their will." “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ~ not actually Henry Ford > "There is an incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that "we know best", this is a very parent-child style relationship: "Mother knows best", that both disempowers and disengages customers." It's not that we know best, it's that we know better than to just listen to users. We have all the data and research. You have an opinion because you're upset. > "Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the vague and nebulous future." We are generally aware of this. However, when we develop a product, we have a process that, for various reasons, goes beyond your particular narrow view of our product. > "When you as a product manager or designer or PO or whatever decide that your product should do A, B and C too, I don't care. I don't want those features, I didn't pay for them." Indeed, not all user share the same requirements and therefore we don't develop the product for any one user in particular. > "When you as a product person change the way that I have to use the product in order to do X, you are asking me to spend time, effort and attention to change my habits around X in order to do something differently, which may (or may not) benefit me in the future." We apologize for the inconvenience. > "In all likelyhood you made it easier for new users to learn X. I don't care about new users." This is where your and our interests clearly diverge. > "Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does X instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in your product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do something in a different product." In all likelyhood, you won't. The cost of learning an entirely different product will likely still be greater than learning the changes we made. Furthermore, there is the cost of another purchase, as well as the sunk cost on your previous purchase. > "The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off that I'll move, no matter what the cost." Really, no matter the cost? Who are you going to move to? The hypothetical competitor that never changes their product? > "The vast majority of the effort that designers spend on look and feel, typeography, colour palettes, image choice and placement, tone of voice, button placement, size and style and a host of other things are of marginal value at best." Design tends to either go over people's heads entirely, or it's highly important. I suppose you're in group A. Still, a product that hasn't had a facelift in a decade will have an appearance of being outdated, even if the underlying technology is modern. > "Thirdly: the idea that you can just tell your customers to suck it up is a relic of last-century marketing that relied on captive customer bases and lack of customer knowledge, awareness and community. Modern customers are, in the majority, well informed and highly vocal with other customers in their community." Vocal they are, indeed. A select few of them at least. Despite this, we will not have our product be held captive by these users. > "The idea of EPP is thus: when you have a product that works, and an existing customer base - freeze it. Instead of a major redisgn because 'Material Design is so 2014' simply leave the product the way it is, bar minor BAU and bug-fix work. Instead devote effort into building a new, next-generation product that addresses (hopefully) a new customer segment, and allow existing customers to add this new product to their portfolio for a incremental fee. This allows existing customers to self-select into a new product, protects revenue and reduces the risk of existing product customers leaving due to badwill." Unfortunately, there is no data to show that this is a terrible idea. Perhaps that's because not many would risk real money on implementing such a presumably terrible idea. There are some known cases of drastic redesigns presumably killing a product. On the other hand, gradual redesigns as well as adding features incrementally are industry-wide standard practice. That process clearly works. Yes, users complain about changes. No, they generally won't switch because of them. They may delay upgrades, but that generally happens with or without changes.
• s1mpl3 7y ago
  Users
  • preordained 7y ago
    Who needs em? Everyone ;)
• kazinator 7y ago
  No change is just one change; it's a set of changes. No set of changes is strictly better for strictly every user. "For the better" is often just better for that user who happens to be the developer.
• tmaly 7y ago
  I agree with this post for the most part. MS Excel when they switched to the ribbon UI was a huge problem for existing users. I have had certain software running with antiquated UIs, but I keep them in place as users know how to use them. They have enough on their plates that they do not want to have to learn something new and deal with the cognitive overload. If the old way works, they will stick with it, as long as it gets the job done.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  We need adequation. Timing or at least clear path toward improvement.
• stcredzero 7y ago
  Firstly: humans don't resist change when it's something that they asked for, they resist things being imposed upon them against their will. There is an incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that "we know best", this is a very parent-child style relationship: "Mother knows best", that both disempowers and disengages customers. Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times Yes! Here's the right way to do a UI revamp: Introduce your powerful, better, shiny new UI as a clone of the old UI. Once the clone is of high fidelity, then introduce the ability to switch to new "skins" or new "modes" which have the new powerful features, or the better UX. Perhaps even set up a scenario with 2 or more competing to win new users. The proper way is to let users discover and move to the new thing. Imposing new UI/UX on users just degrades goodwill, and it also hides data about where the new version has flaws or needs improvement. Adopting change needs to be a "pull" and not a "push."
• jedberg 7y ago
  Two related stories. At one point way back in the day, eBay wanted to change the background color of the main page from yellow to white. They didn't just make the change one day, instead they slowly changed the hex code every couple of days so the change was gradual. When it was complete, some people would say stuff like, "Hey, didn't the background used to be yellow, when did that change?". When I worked at reddit I told this story, and we ended up using the same technique to move from a two line display to a three line display. Each day we slight changed the spacing to make it larger, until we had enough room for the three lines, and then we switched to three lines. Some people even responded to people's complaints by saying, "but it doesn't take up any more space than the old two line display!". Of course this was reddit, and at the time the code was totally open source, so someone found the daily checkins to change the spacing and outed us, forcing us to put the "compress the link display" checkbox into the preferences, which is still there to this day.
  • mynameishere 7y ago
    compress the link display To save people from checking, this seems to turn off the preview images and the link scores. Not sure what 2- vs 3-line is referring to.
    • jedberg 7y ago
      If you go to old.reddit.com, each link takes three lines (the title, the metadata, and the buttons). If you check that box, it goes back to the old two line display (the title, and then metadata and buttons on one line).
  • shawndrost 7y ago
    Wow. From where I'm sitting it seems like Reddit went to the ends of the earth to make users happy during periods of change, and wound up with a prevailingly negative reputation (in its own community) for its efforts. Was that the impression internally as well?
    • jedberg 7y ago
• vjagrawal1984 7y ago
  Basecamp.com has this model, every new redesign/upgrade become a new product, co-existing with older one.
• bruhmoment 7y ago
  Why do people hate change? Because of BLOAT. No one gives a shit about your fucking react or electron or node bloat bullshit, give me a fucking simple site like lazyfoo.net this whole Web 2.0 is so fucked up and inaccessible to people in 3rd world countries or even just pla es where connectivity is bad. People care about looks, aesthetic, style. It's all form over function nowadays. nearly 2 decades ago, Windows XP used less than a 100MB RAM and was initially buggy shit. Back then, the SP updates FIXED issues; they didn't CREATE them. I want to go back
• flaque 7y ago
  This is wildly dependent on your original design actually being good. Many products are NOT good at first and constantly redesign until they get something good. It's silly to give blanket advice "never redesign your product."
• z3t4 7y ago
  The hardest part in software development is probably to not add new features. Learned the hard way. (The things users tell you they want, is rarely what they actually want.)
• sizzle 7y ago
  Wow this person is projecting their ignorance of the decades of academic HCI studies and industry best practices, including UX design and research methodologies for bringing the user into the design process (to understand their needs) and uncovering user insights from testing designs early on in the design process. Would love to see some concrete examples of redesigns that support the author's argument because I can provide plenty that prove the opposite which simplified user flows and introduced better conceptual models/interaction design patterns that were vetted through user testing. Maybe they've only worked with smaller teams or visual/graphic designers. Any large organization with a competent UX team can easily dismiss a majority of their claims by exposing them to the UX design process. "Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does X instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in your product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do something in a different product." Product redesigns should optimize and make product features more efficient/simple to use for the core audience (user personas [1]) and support their experience in achieving their end goals (journey mapping [2]). (Downvoters- would love to hear your perspective) 1. https://www.nngroup.com/videos/personas/ https://www.nngroup.com/videos/personas/ 2. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/
  • gergles 7y ago
    I imagine you’re being downvoted because your post comes across as another smug designer/product person saying “I know better than you, you uneducated philistine”, with a side of “you just haven’t seen it done right and your personal experience is wrong.” I’m sure Reddit’s abortion of a redesign has went through hundreds of rounds of UX testing and has been signed off on by the masters of the field, but it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy. It does everything worse than the existing design, except perhaps for increasing some sort of pointless dashboard metric users don’t care about.
    • sizzle 7y ago
      The author's post came off the same way you've described (to my ears), while targeting design without any concrete examples so it's all conjecture as far as I'm concerned. Designers and developers should work closely together, I depend on them for their technical feasibility/performance subject matter expertise. "Reddit redesign [...] it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy." I agree Reddit's redesign is a mess and it's largely the implementation and development by the hands of developers whose job it is to code and otherwise discuss performance tradeoffs with product team/design stakeholders for exactly all the items you describe. How are designers to blame for how it was coded? Devs should have voiced concern if they knew the proposed designs would be a performance disaster on the publicly facing front-end.
• jbverschoor 7y ago
  Guess what. Programmeurs hate change directer by others too. Otherwise we’d all be working in the “perfect” language, and all this legacy wouldnt be be here. It’s simply an egoistic/arrogant point of view of “the designer”, which can be a programmer, pm, visual designer, ceo, anyone really, who thinks he’s better and smarter than the rest, and thinks he holds the perfect solution. Sometimes this turns out right. Often it doesnt
• skybrian 7y ago
  This is why products are different than services. You don't own a service, and if they want to change it, that's their business.
• Zenst 7y ago
  I know I hate change, though some changes that I loath initially, can and do grow on me. Though there are always some that do not. But as a whole, most change is good. Just that initial impact and we go from an autonomous interaction from various queues to having a new layout, sequence, feature or even font. Those put us off out pace and for want of another way of putting it - mess with your mojo. Over time, we adjust, some changes quicker than others, other changes take longer. Few never at all take. But then we all have those, and if enough users still dislike those changes, they tend to get rolled-back, but not all. I will also add another tangent to this: We tend to overlike change we create or instigate.
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Users are lazy creatures of habit. Energy conservation.
• jasonlotito 7y ago
  The author completely ignores the part where the customers want the changes. This entire post is incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric, as well as being wrong-headed on several counts.
• notSupplied 7y ago
  "We know what's best for the user" is assuming you are even designing for the user in the first place. The user is often not the customer, and design changes are ultimately here to serve the company, not the user: - How can we increase number of ads users will tolerate? - How do we increase the amount of content users share? - How do we increase the number of likes/hearts they send? I wouldn't be surprised if the lionshare of user backlash comes from decisions that weren't meant to serve the user in the first place.
• dingo_bat 7y ago
  I had a very jarring experience a few months ago with pocket casts. I had bought the app on play store a long time ago to listen to podcasts in my car. I had it set up to auto download my podcasts and certain other automations. I get into my car in the morning, put my phone into a clamp, open the app and it plays through my car Bluetooth. One morning I was in a hurry to leave because I was running a bit late. I open the app and it's like a completely new app! Nothing was left unchanged. My download and automation settings were either reset or those features had been removed. The app now looked like some design interns over-zealous first attempt. I gave up and turned on the radio. Until this day I haven't been able to set it back up exactly like I had it before. And this is an app I paid for. It was very cheap, sure, but still.