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Companies often want to release incremental, small features, not major UI overhauls. Speaking as a product leader who has been in a position to decide on these

Companies often want to release incremental, small features, not major UI overhauls. Speaking as a product leader who has been in a position to decide on these, I'm not opposed to major UI overhauls, but many that have been proposed to me: - Are motivated by a design team that wants to justify their jobs or make a mark on a product, with the UI considerations secondary. - Have major issues and design weaknesses themselves. - Throw out important aspects of functionality in an attempt to be "fresh and simple". - Ignore that we had our last major overhaul 12 months ago, and that one was in response to the major ovehaul 24 months ago. Requiring evolution rather than revolution is a hedge against these problems. I'm not generally opposed to overhauls because I'm familiar with the importance of UI. For example, I'm very unhappy with Robinhood as a trading platform, but damn, switching to Fidelity is painful because their UI is so terrible. I wish I more consistently got to work with talented designers. I put a lot of effort into getting good designers, as poor designers can wreak havoc.

brabel 6y ago
Great points. I also want to add that it's extremely important to try not to disturb power users when your target audience is developers. They (us) use muscle memory to do things, they know exactly where things are and how to achieve things... move something a few pixels or bury it into a sub-menu, and you break someone's workflow, which is really annoying and requires days or weeks or re-learning. Major UI overhauls in developer tools like IDEs would be disastrous IMO. Jetbrains does it very well IMO: small changes on every version, mostly cosmetic so the tool keeps looking modern, but very rarely anything that breaks power user workflows. But that still happens... I remember two recently: they changed the search UI so that Cmd+O on Mac would no longer find files (you need Cmd+Shift+O to include files now), only type names. Because sometimes we copy the file name from a log or stack trace, that was annoying as hell to remember to press Shift to achieve the previous behaviour (the justification was that the search dialog became much richer and categorized now, which is fair enough). Another one: they started pushing a new "non-modal" commit dialog... similar to how VSCode does it... I hate that, I just want my modal dialog as that makes it easier for me to separate what's actual source file and what's just a "view" of the diffs! But luckily, as is often the case, they have an option to use the previous mode which I love so much, so that was just a minor inconvenience while upgrading.

brabel 6y ago

Great points. I also want to add that it's extremely important to try not to disturb power users when your target audience is developers. They (us) use muscle memory to do things, they know exactly where things are and how to achieve things... move something a few pixels or bury it into a sub-menu, and you break someone's workflow, which is really annoying and requires days or weeks or re-learning. Major UI overhauls in developer tools like IDEs would be disastrous IMO. Jetbrains does it very well IMO: small changes on every version, mostly cosmetic so the tool keeps looking modern, but very rarely anything that breaks power user workflows. But that still happens... I remember two recently: they changed the search UI so that Cmd+O on Mac would no longer find files (you need Cmd+Shift+O to include files now), only type names. Because sometimes we copy the file name from a log or stack trace, that was annoying as hell to remember to press Shift to achieve the previous behaviour (the justification was that the search dialog became much richer and categorized now, which is fair enough). Another one: they started pushing a new "non-modal" commit dialog... similar to how VSCode does it... I hate that, I just want my modal dialog as that makes it easier for me to separate what's actual source file and what's just a "view" of the diffs! But luckily, as is often the case, they have an option to use the previous mode which I love so much, so that was just a minor inconvenience while upgrading.