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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 alwa

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.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    I'm glad you used old.reddit.com as your example and you also almost nailed my age group (45+). As a user, I'd point to Reddit as the quintessential example of unnecessary change for the sake of change. To my elderly sensibilities, old.reddit.com is better in every single way than the new travesty. Loads faster, less janky, nothing jumping around as content loads, no autoplaying, denser presentation, fills the browser window as I maximize it--by the way this is my #1 bugaboo with "modern" web design: stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser!!! I have a 27" monitor and I want to use the whole thing goddamnit. So from the point of view of an end user like me, they took something great and ruined everything. I can't imagine that a 25 year old likes the new design better, but then again I can't put myself into the shoes of a 25 year old, so maybe they love jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups begging them to log in or use the app. I'm sure from the point of view of Reddit however, the new design is awesome in all ways they measure. Probably revenue, "engagement" (ugggghhhh I hate that word), time on site (thanks to infinite scrolling), whatever it is they find important and prioritize. I can tell you they don't prioritize "usable by a 45 year old with disposable income".
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      > stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser I had assumed this general tend was to work well on mobile, yet Reddit couldn't do more to make it unbearable to use the website on mobile instead of their app. Constant popups to harass you into using the mobile app
      - necovek 5y ago
        Good design for readability suggest using line lengths which are around 60-70 characters long (at least in print with serif fonts). My main gripe with narrow columns of content is that they rarely resize properly to smaller desktop sizes (I prefer side-by-side-by-side windows on my large 32" screen, so much that I am considering switching to new 42" oled screens showing up this year — if they were 8k and I had a gpu to drive it, I'd be ecstatic ;)).
    - 5y ago

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.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  I'm glad you used old.reddit.com as your example and you also almost nailed my age group (45+). As a user, I'd point to Reddit as the quintessential example of unnecessary change for the sake of change. To my elderly sensibilities, old.reddit.com is better in every single way than the new travesty. Loads faster, less janky, nothing jumping around as content loads, no autoplaying, denser presentation, fills the browser window as I maximize it--by the way this is my #1 bugaboo with "modern" web design: stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser!!! I have a 27" monitor and I want to use the whole thing goddamnit. So from the point of view of an end user like me, they took something great and ruined everything. I can't imagine that a 25 year old likes the new design better, but then again I can't put myself into the shoes of a 25 year old, so maybe they love jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups begging them to log in or use the app. I'm sure from the point of view of Reddit however, the new design is awesome in all ways they measure. Probably revenue, "engagement" (ugggghhhh I hate that word), time on site (thanks to infinite scrolling), whatever it is they find important and prioritize. I can tell you they don't prioritize "usable by a 45 year old with disposable income".
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    > stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser I had assumed this general tend was to work well on mobile, yet Reddit couldn't do more to make it unbearable to use the website on mobile instead of their app. Constant popups to harass you into using the mobile app
    - necovek 5y ago
      Good design for readability suggest using line lengths which are around 60-70 characters long (at least in print with serif fonts). My main gripe with narrow columns of content is that they rarely resize properly to smaller desktop sizes (I prefer side-by-side-by-side windows on my large 32" screen, so much that I am considering switching to new 42" oled screens showing up this year — if they were 8k and I had a gpu to drive it, I'd be ecstatic ;)).
  - 5y ago