6 ms·

Ah, redesigns, the preserve of the company who has run out of ideas. To be fair, I don't think that what Meta is doing is a redesign but plenty of other compani

Ah, redesigns, the preserve of the company who has run out of ideas. To be fair, I don't think that what Meta is doing is a redesign but plenty of other companies think that you make something look a bit swisher then everyone will come back. My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?" I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.

pmontra 5y ago
I don't want to sound harsh but nobody needs 500 designers or 500 developers (or - pick your favorites) forever unless they have some real work to do that grows the business. The problem is that managers never let go soldiers from their army (let me use this metaphor) because they have to fight other managers to climb the company ladder. This is probably detrimental to the company but it's not what would they care about and it's ok. At best it's a symbiotic relationship in which they can jump host.
- valenterry 5y ago
  I wish that were true, but I disagree. With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. It might not use SSL so the browser will show ugly warnings or might even stop working completely. Security fixes need to be applied or the website gets hacked. The underlying webserver / platform gets outdated and the provider stops supporting it eventually - or just makes it more expensive. I could go on. Do you need 500 developers for that? Well, that depends on the size. Maybe, maybe not. But your post gives this vibe of "build it and be done with it" and with software that just doesn't work, even if the business is not growing at all.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    I know, we have to run to stay where we are. Nevertheless maintenance is usually less resource intensive than building. It's possible that the new features a company has to add plus maintenance of the existing ones require an ever increasing staff, but not for every single company.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      I hate greenfield work until it gets in front of users. By that time it's maintenance...as are new features. I love maintenance because you have a working application (which is the goal) and changes are (or should be) in response to user feedback. "Features" that are derived from internal dialog usually sicken me because they are usually user hostile. Anything that isn't user focused and accessible boils my soul. Churn for user manipulation, and developer induced complexity really piss me off. My favorite is when we build a decent application and then marketing brings the UX to it's gnees with 27 tracking cookies.
  - nightski 5y ago
    Can you imagine the productivity of society if technologists could get a grip on churn? I'd go so far as to say it's a crises in our industry. But the cost is very hidden.
    - chiefalchemist 5y ago
      It's not the technologists. It's the market. Humans are well, um, human. Quirky, unpredictable, fickle, etc. A UI / UX that tests well with a dozen or two people might flop once the market gets to it. And then of course, expectations evolve. It's less churn and simply life and humanity.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    >With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab. >Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone? Those end up being worse e.g. the fixed floating headers/footers that take 60% of the screen in landscape mode when the desktop version was actually usable. (With portrait not being much better.)
indigochill 5y ago
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. IMO people's emotional response to UI is a lot like emotional response to cash as a compensation mechanism. If it's markedly insufficient they're unhappy, but there's a pretty modest cutoff point past which there are rapidly diminishing returns. And it if keeps changing in inconsequential ways they get nervous.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
By the time you finally get used to the UI they're already pushing out a new design :( No I don't care about your new icons.
H1Supreme 5y ago
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Users aren't supposed to care about the UI, at all. They're supposed to use it. Feelings about a user interface usually come to the surface when it's confusing, or makes their tasks more difficult to complete. If you're users never think twice about the design, you've succeeded!
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Yup. If I design a UI and you have any feelings about it at all (other than maybe 'oh, I like this font' or 'that's a nice color choice'), I've done it wrong.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Redesigns are most often about branding and other BS and not about usability.
  - rurp 5y ago
    I would add that pushing users to behavior the company wants, but users mostly don't, as a very common reason. Sometimes more profitable features don't get the hoped for amount of traction, or the company wants to push users towards behavior that lets them collect more data or show more ads. I've seen even stupider reasons too, where a team is sad that some functionality isn't getting used much, so they push for a redesign to shove users into it. There are valid reasons to redesign an app but I would say that the majority of them are not done for the benefit of the users.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    The irony is it's the usability thst sucks, no one realizes or admits it, and the blame gets placed on the design. The redesign comes up short. A head or two rolls. The process continues. Text book insanity.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Spot on. The UI and UX should be forgettable. Forgettable in the sense that the user should walk away with a feeling of their accomplishment, not how pretty the drop shadows were.
cdbattags 5y ago
I still use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec... New Reddit is awful
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > – New Reddit, please show me this thread with 14 comments > – Here you go! Here’s the first four comments. > – … > – You’re welcome.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
Had a friend who worked at one of those old internet portals. Their main portal was losing traffic. They wanted to redesign, but any A/B test of UI changes always resulted in faster loss of traffic (because of the "where is that button" effect). Ie people were only clinging to them because they were familiar with the UI and if that changed, they'd just go somewhere else. The solution? Dozens of incremental changes to get from the old UI to the new one. Need to move a button across the site? Move it 10px at a time over a few weeks/month. Anything faster would just make the iceberg melt faster.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Haha, seems they just had to do that re-design, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about programmers and it's also true about UI designers. If there's no clear direction to take the product, they'll just re-design, refactor, move classes around, change button colors, break things into microservices, rewrite in Rust, re-do the brand design, invent unnecessary custom controls, port it to a Raspberry Pi, add whitespace and 'flat' design, move the search bar to the bottom of the screen, and on and on and on. Programmers gotta program and designers gotta design.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    A lot of the reasons companies do redesigns is strategic. When a company first gets successful, it builds for the tastes, preferences, and needs of the userbase at that time. And as it gets more successful, it progressively micro-optimizes for those tastes, so eventually the company and the users that made it successful are tightly intertwined. For a company to grow, it needs to attract new users. And tastes change, often surprisingly quickly. What was hot for new users in the early 2000s looks incredibly dated now - just check out old.reddit.com or search for [google in 1998] for examples. As someone entering my 40s who was in college or just out of it at the time, those UIs fill me with nostalgia. But someone who's in college now would be like "What is this shit?" As a side note, this is why HNers are generally terrible at predicting new product trends now, and tend to poo-poo a lot of things that are gaining remarkable traction. Most of us are in our 30s and 40s by now, a time when our habits are basically set and we have neither the time, energy, or social networks to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. To really get a sense of what captures peoples' energy, you need to be one of the people whose energy is captured (or at least watch them closely), which requires the lack of cynicism and judgment that comes with experience.
munificent 5y ago
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. I believe we undervalue how much UI will get people in the door and overvalue how much it will keep them there. When a user is seeking novelty, design is a huge component of that. When they are seeking familiarity, any change is an anti-feature. You pick a new restaurant based on the originality of its menu. You keep going because you fall in love with a couple of items on it. You stop going when they change things up and discard your favorite dish.

pmontra 5y ago

I don't want to sound harsh but nobody needs 500 designers or 500 developers (or - pick your favorites) forever unless they have some real work to do that grows the business. The problem is that managers never let go soldiers from their army (let me use this metaphor) because they have to fight other managers to climb the company ladder. This is probably detrimental to the company but it's not what would they care about and it's ok. At best it's a symbiotic relationship in which they can jump host.

valenterry 5y ago
I wish that were true, but I disagree. With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. It might not use SSL so the browser will show ugly warnings or might even stop working completely. Security fixes need to be applied or the website gets hacked. The underlying webserver / platform gets outdated and the provider stops supporting it eventually - or just makes it more expensive. I could go on. Do you need 500 developers for that? Well, that depends on the size. Maybe, maybe not. But your post gives this vibe of "build it and be done with it" and with software that just doesn't work, even if the business is not growing at all.
- pmontra 5y ago
  I know, we have to run to stay where we are. Nevertheless maintenance is usually less resource intensive than building. It's possible that the new features a company has to add plus maintenance of the existing ones require an ever increasing staff, but not for every single company.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I hate greenfield work until it gets in front of users. By that time it's maintenance...as are new features. I love maintenance because you have a working application (which is the goal) and changes are (or should be) in response to user feedback. "Features" that are derived from internal dialog usually sicken me because they are usually user hostile. Anything that isn't user focused and accessible boils my soul. Churn for user manipulation, and developer induced complexity really piss me off. My favorite is when we build a decent application and then marketing brings the UX to it's gnees with 27 tracking cookies.
- nightski 5y ago
  Can you imagine the productivity of society if technologists could get a grip on churn? I'd go so far as to say it's a crises in our industry. But the cost is very hidden.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    It's not the technologists. It's the market. Humans are well, um, human. Quirky, unpredictable, fickle, etc. A UI / UX that tests well with a dozen or two people might flop once the market gets to it. And then of course, expectations evolve. It's less churn and simply life and humanity.
- SilasX 5y ago
  >With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab. >Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone? Those end up being worse e.g. the fixed floating headers/footers that take 60% of the screen in landscape mode when the desktop version was actually usable. (With portrait not being much better.)

indigochill 5y ago

> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. IMO people's emotional response to UI is a lot like emotional response to cash as a compensation mechanism. If it's markedly insufficient they're unhappy, but there's a pretty modest cutoff point past which there are rapidly diminishing returns. And it if keeps changing in inconsequential ways they get nervous.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

By the time you finally get used to the UI they're already pushing out a new design :( No I don't care about your new icons.

H1Supreme 5y ago

> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Users aren't supposed to care about the UI, at all. They're supposed to use it. Feelings about a user interface usually come to the surface when it's confusing, or makes their tasks more difficult to complete. If you're users never think twice about the design, you've succeeded!

Mezzie 5y ago
Yup. If I design a UI and you have any feelings about it at all (other than maybe 'oh, I like this font' or 'that's a nice color choice'), I've done it wrong.
karmakaze 5y ago
Redesigns are most often about branding and other BS and not about usability.
- rurp 5y ago
  I would add that pushing users to behavior the company wants, but users mostly don't, as a very common reason. Sometimes more profitable features don't get the hoped for amount of traction, or the company wants to push users towards behavior that lets them collect more data or show more ads. I've seen even stupider reasons too, where a team is sad that some functionality isn't getting used much, so they push for a redesign to shove users into it. There are valid reasons to redesign an app but I would say that the majority of them are not done for the benefit of the users.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  The irony is it's the usability thst sucks, no one realizes or admits it, and the blame gets placed on the design. The redesign comes up short. A head or two rolls. The process continues. Text book insanity.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Spot on. The UI and UX should be forgettable. Forgettable in the sense that the user should walk away with a feeling of their accomplishment, not how pretty the drop shadows were.

cdbattags 5y ago

I still use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec... New Reddit is awful

avgcorrection 5y ago
> – New Reddit, please show me this thread with 14 comments > – Here you go! Here’s the first four comments. > – … > – You’re welcome.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

Had a friend who worked at one of those old internet portals. Their main portal was losing traffic. They wanted to redesign, but any A/B test of UI changes always resulted in faster loss of traffic (because of the "where is that button" effect). Ie people were only clinging to them because they were familiar with the UI and if that changed, they'd just go somewhere else. The solution? Dozens of incremental changes to get from the old UI to the new one. Need to move a button across the site? Move it 10px at a time over a few weeks/month. Anything faster would just make the iceberg melt faster.

ryandrake 5y ago
Haha, seems they just had to do that re-design, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about programmers and it's also true about UI designers. If there's no clear direction to take the product, they'll just re-design, refactor, move classes around, change button colors, break things into microservices, rewrite in Rust, re-do the brand design, invent unnecessary custom controls, port it to a Raspberry Pi, add whitespace and 'flat' design, move the search bar to the bottom of the screen, and on and on and on. Programmers gotta program and designers gotta design.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  A lot of the reasons companies do redesigns is strategic. When a company first gets successful, it builds for the tastes, preferences, and needs of the userbase at that time. And as it gets more successful, it progressively micro-optimizes for those tastes, so eventually the company and the users that made it successful are tightly intertwined. For a company to grow, it needs to attract new users. And tastes change, often surprisingly quickly. What was hot for new users in the early 2000s looks incredibly dated now - just check out old.reddit.com or search for [google in 1998] for examples. As someone entering my 40s who was in college or just out of it at the time, those UIs fill me with nostalgia. But someone who's in college now would be like "What is this shit?" As a side note, this is why HNers are generally terrible at predicting new product trends now, and tend to poo-poo a lot of things that are gaining remarkable traction. Most of us are in our 30s and 40s by now, a time when our habits are basically set and we have neither the time, energy, or social networks to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. To really get a sense of what captures peoples' energy, you need to be one of the people whose energy is captured (or at least watch them closely), which requires the lack of cynicism and judgment that comes with experience.

munificent 5y ago

> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. I believe we undervalue how much UI will get people in the door and overvalue how much it will keep them there. When a user is seeking novelty, design is a huge component of that. When they are seeking familiarity, any change is an anti-feature. You pick a new restaurant based on the originality of its menu. You keep going because you fall in love with a couple of items on it. You stop going when they change things up and discard your favorite dish.