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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

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.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    What? How?
antoineMoPa 7y ago
Facebook is so slow on my Chromebook that I stopped using the main site and use mbasic.facebook.com What was once a performant chat+newsfeed app has gradually become a slow elephant.
karrotwaltz 7y ago
> Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place. I was using twitter to follow very few, high quality feeds, and with this new update it was made clear that the intended usage is the opposite. No more twitter for me, I'm back to good old RSS feeds. Beside that, I can't believe anyone would find the new design better than the old one on a monitor, the menu has more presence than the actual tweets.
- yboris 7y ago
  The Twitter redesign (last week or so?) has been wonderful for me: it keeps your place in navigation, allowing you to look at a tweet thread and go back to the place you were before. Previously on Twitter, after any navigation you'd lose your place, having to scroll (and reload all the previously-seen content) very far if you were down far.
  - mikro2nd 7y ago
    On the other hand, every time I have been back since the changeover, they reset my feed to 'algorithmically chosen tweets' (or whatever they call it) instead of the "by time posted" option I invariably want and choose. It's gotten so I'm pretty unlikely to go back to Twitter now, since along with this major annoyance, it's ugly, cluttered to the point of near unusable, and all-round annoying to me. So long and thanks for all the tweety birds, I guess.
    - yxhuvud 7y ago
      The same issue exist in the Facebook feed, by the way. I really wonder why they won't allow people to be able to set it permanently.
      - rightbyte 7y ago
        Because they want to control what people see in their feeds to prolong eyeball seconds, which you get by hiding what you find interesting in piles of poo.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> 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. Are you using the same Facebook as I do? Every time they rearranged more than a single button there was an uproar. People do care, but there's exactly nothing they can do except whining. Facebook doesn't care, and people won't leave because their friends are there.
- johnday 7y ago
  I guess that's a side effect of the siloing that goes on on Facebook. I certainly heard nothing major about it, and orders of magnitude less than the same/similar people about the Twitter redesigns.
  - causalmodels 7y ago
    That's because media people cannot do their jobs without Twitter. Since they have the megaphone, everyone hears about their gripes.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    In the earlier days of Facebook, say until 2012 or so, there were definitely huge uproars when there were major changes. I think that after a while people just had basic "learned helplessness" symptoms - there weren't really any possible alternatives to FB due to network effects, so they just got used to it.
wycy 7y ago
People do hate change, regardless of how much better that change is. I don't think I've ever seen a UI redesign over which users didn't get into a massive uproar. I certainly saw the massive uproar any time FB introduced a UI change. Sure, some UI redesigns are just plain bad and users are justified in hating them. The twitter redesign does appear to be clunky/bad as you noted. The new Reddit seems to be another case of the redesign being pretty bad. But users will unfailingly hate every major redesign without fail regardless of how much better it is. If users had their way, Windows 10 would still look like Windows 98. Facebook would still look like this [0]. [0] https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2007-Facebook.jpg https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20...
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > regardless of how much better it is. No, the simple truth is it's not better if users hate it. It means it failed to account for existing users and their use cases.
  - wycy 7y ago
    With that rationale you literally can't change anything ever. Version 1.0 ever after. It is better if it ultimately just takes time for them to like it. The same people who initially hated it will most likely grow to like it. When we migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last year, my boss was extremely upset--but he was just as upset a decade ago having to upgrade to Windows 7 in the first place. Users come around eventually.
    - rurp 7y ago
      God I hate this kind of paternalistic reasoning from developers. Nobody is saying that you can never update software ever, just that those updates should be driven by a clear functional reason. Implementing a change that you know your users will hate just to switch to a "modern" UI does not serve users. > Users come around eventually. How do you know? A number of apps I use have overhauled their UI in a way that made it look shinier at a glance, but categorically worse for actually using. I either stopped using them if the change was too awful, or eventually just stopped leaving negative feedback once it was clear the devs didn't care. Never once have I hated an update at first and later thought to myself, "Wow I was so wrong, this update is actually amazing, I'm glad the dev team ignored all of that negative feedback and forced it on their existing users".
dunnevens 7y ago
That's a great observation. I've had similar thoughts about Windows 8/10 changes and the reaction of their long term users. Incremental does seem to be the best way. People also tolerate dramatic changes well if there's an option to revert to the old ways. Which is something Microsoft used to do well. Almost every big user-facing change, like the Aero desktop, could be reverted back to "Classic" if the user wanted. Or a feature considered obnoxious could be disabled. Either via the Control Panel, or via a group policy. It's difficult to hate a new feature or UI change if you can simply turn it off. But, with 8 and 10, they switched to a much more restrictive attitude and their reputation took a considerable hit. This is something Apple is doing well with iOS. Obviously, 6->7 was a disruptive (and controversial) transition. But since then, their incremental approach seems to have worked very well.
Ntrails 7y ago
> Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss I mean, I pretty much hated everything Facebook did since I used to have an actual news feed of things my friends did/said. Peoples profiles stopped being a place to go and put things. Conversations moved from wall to wall, to comments with the stupidest fucking nesting and ui I've ever seen. I never really used twitter - so can't comment - but facebook drove me off their platform as much as I outgrew it. As for noise/fuss - Twitter is a shouting platform where things snowball in a different way.
svnpenn 7y ago
I think a big part of it is tards like Mark Otto: https://github.com/mdo https://github.com/mdo that make changes without regard of how useful or disruptive they are: https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830138373230653440 https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830138373230653440
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Wow, that Twitter thread was horrible. Users: “this UI change is terrible, please provide a way to opt out!” Designer: “You’re all wrong. I’m an artist and I say it’s better. Get over it!” Literally the trashiest response a developer can have to honest end user feedback. All ego. May I never have to work with this guy.
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    honestly it reads mostly fine to me. people are overreacting to a trivial change.
- dang 7y ago
  Please make your substantive points without personal attacks or name-calling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
astine 7y ago
"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." Honestly, I think that this is part of the point, at least with social media applications. When people get used to an application, and it works predictably, they have control over their use of it, and can fit it into their lives how they see fit. This isn't what social media companies want. Social media companies want users to spend as much time using their applications as possible which means setting up skinnerbox-esque mechanisms as much as possible which requires the application to at least be a little bit unpredictable. Replacing time based news feeds with unpredictable algorithmic ones is one way to do this, but any kind of change throws the user's sense of balance off. If the user doesn't quit right away (and most don't) they have the potential to become more dependent going forward.

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.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  What? How?

antoineMoPa 7y ago

Facebook is so slow on my Chromebook that I stopped using the main site and use mbasic.facebook.com What was once a performant chat+newsfeed app has gradually become a slow elephant.

karrotwaltz 7y ago

> Every change causes people to question why they use the site in the first place. I was using twitter to follow very few, high quality feeds, and with this new update it was made clear that the intended usage is the opposite. No more twitter for me, I'm back to good old RSS feeds. Beside that, I can't believe anyone would find the new design better than the old one on a monitor, the menu has more presence than the actual tweets.

yboris 7y ago
The Twitter redesign (last week or so?) has been wonderful for me: it keeps your place in navigation, allowing you to look at a tweet thread and go back to the place you were before. Previously on Twitter, after any navigation you'd lose your place, having to scroll (and reload all the previously-seen content) very far if you were down far.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  On the other hand, every time I have been back since the changeover, they reset my feed to 'algorithmically chosen tweets' (or whatever they call it) instead of the "by time posted" option I invariably want and choose. It's gotten so I'm pretty unlikely to go back to Twitter now, since along with this major annoyance, it's ugly, cluttered to the point of near unusable, and all-round annoying to me. So long and thanks for all the tweety birds, I guess.
  - yxhuvud 7y ago
    The same issue exist in the Facebook feed, by the way. I really wonder why they won't allow people to be able to set it permanently.
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      Because they want to control what people see in their feeds to prolong eyeball seconds, which you get by hiding what you find interesting in piles of poo.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> 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. Are you using the same Facebook as I do? Every time they rearranged more than a single button there was an uproar. People do care, but there's exactly nothing they can do except whining. Facebook doesn't care, and people won't leave because their friends are there.

johnday 7y ago
I guess that's a side effect of the siloing that goes on on Facebook. I certainly heard nothing major about it, and orders of magnitude less than the same/similar people about the Twitter redesigns.
- causalmodels 7y ago
  That's because media people cannot do their jobs without Twitter. Since they have the megaphone, everyone hears about their gripes.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  In the earlier days of Facebook, say until 2012 or so, there were definitely huge uproars when there were major changes. I think that after a while people just had basic "learned helplessness" symptoms - there weren't really any possible alternatives to FB due to network effects, so they just got used to it.

wycy 7y ago

People do hate change, regardless of how much better that change is. I don't think I've ever seen a UI redesign over which users didn't get into a massive uproar. I certainly saw the massive uproar any time FB introduced a UI change. Sure, some UI redesigns are just plain bad and users are justified in hating them. The twitter redesign does appear to be clunky/bad as you noted. The new Reddit seems to be another case of the redesign being pretty bad. But users will unfailingly hate every major redesign without fail regardless of how much better it is. If users had their way, Windows 10 would still look like Windows 98. Facebook would still look like this [0]. [0] https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2007-Facebook.jpg https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/20...

zzzcpan 7y ago
> regardless of how much better it is. No, the simple truth is it's not better if users hate it. It means it failed to account for existing users and their use cases.
- wycy 7y ago
  With that rationale you literally can't change anything ever. Version 1.0 ever after. It is better if it ultimately just takes time for them to like it. The same people who initially hated it will most likely grow to like it. When we migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last year, my boss was extremely upset--but he was just as upset a decade ago having to upgrade to Windows 7 in the first place. Users come around eventually.
  - rurp 7y ago
    God I hate this kind of paternalistic reasoning from developers. Nobody is saying that you can never update software ever, just that those updates should be driven by a clear functional reason. Implementing a change that you know your users will hate just to switch to a "modern" UI does not serve users. > Users come around eventually. How do you know? A number of apps I use have overhauled their UI in a way that made it look shinier at a glance, but categorically worse for actually using. I either stopped using them if the change was too awful, or eventually just stopped leaving negative feedback once it was clear the devs didn't care. Never once have I hated an update at first and later thought to myself, "Wow I was so wrong, this update is actually amazing, I'm glad the dev team ignored all of that negative feedback and forced it on their existing users".

dunnevens 7y ago

That's a great observation. I've had similar thoughts about Windows 8/10 changes and the reaction of their long term users. Incremental does seem to be the best way. People also tolerate dramatic changes well if there's an option to revert to the old ways. Which is something Microsoft used to do well. Almost every big user-facing change, like the Aero desktop, could be reverted back to "Classic" if the user wanted. Or a feature considered obnoxious could be disabled. Either via the Control Panel, or via a group policy. It's difficult to hate a new feature or UI change if you can simply turn it off. But, with 8 and 10, they switched to a much more restrictive attitude and their reputation took a considerable hit. This is something Apple is doing well with iOS. Obviously, 6->7 was a disruptive (and controversial) transition. But since then, their incremental approach seems to have worked very well.

Ntrails 7y ago

> Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss I mean, I pretty much hated everything Facebook did since I used to have an actual news feed of things my friends did/said. Peoples profiles stopped being a place to go and put things. Conversations moved from wall to wall, to comments with the stupidest fucking nesting and ui I've ever seen. I never really used twitter - so can't comment - but facebook drove me off their platform as much as I outgrew it. As for noise/fuss - Twitter is a shouting platform where things snowball in a different way.

svnpenn 7y ago

I think a big part of it is tards like Mark Otto: https://github.com/mdo https://github.com/mdo that make changes without regard of how useful or disruptive they are: https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830138373230653440 https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830138373230653440

ryandrake 7y ago
Wow, that Twitter thread was horrible. Users: “this UI change is terrible, please provide a way to opt out!” Designer: “You’re all wrong. I’m an artist and I say it’s better. Get over it!” Literally the trashiest response a developer can have to honest end user feedback. All ego. May I never have to work with this guy.
- brokensegue 7y ago
  honestly it reads mostly fine to me. people are overreacting to a trivial change.
dang 7y ago
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks or name-calling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

astine 7y ago

"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." Honestly, I think that this is part of the point, at least with social media applications. When people get used to an application, and it works predictably, they have control over their use of it, and can fit it into their lives how they see fit. This isn't what social media companies want. Social media companies want users to spend as much time using their applications as possible which means setting up skinnerbox-esque mechanisms as much as possible which requires the application to at least be a little bit unpredictable. Replacing time based news feeds with unpredictable algorithmic ones is one way to do this, but any kind of change throws the user's sense of balance off. If the user doesn't quit right away (and most don't) they have the potential to become more dependent going forward.