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This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in

This reminds me of when I worked for a B2C company in the healthcare space. We hired a freelance designer to redesign our checkout flow and we wanted it done in time for Black Friday, which was by far our biggest day of the year. Of course the project ran long and we crunched so that we could ship the redesign exactly on Black Friday. I think we shipped the Tuesday before (because Thanksgiving) and everything seemed normal. Black Friday rolls around and we go into the office and they have our internal dashboard monitors set up with our Black Friday unit sales counts. Spoiler alert: it did not go well. We were something like 25% off of our goal and 10-15% off of our previous year's sales. Exec team is freaking out and they order us to revert the design change ASAP in the early afternoon. We do and sure enough, we see our sales start to increase. Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did.

jessermeyer 4y ago
Was there ever a follow up to help determine why? Were repeat customers returning and panicked when they saw a new, and unexpected, layout change?
MaxPengwing 4y ago
Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it. People hate changes to their workflow.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand. Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...
    - spcebar 4y ago
      I wonder if this is an intentional choice to adapt to the tastes of local markets?
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        I would assume so, Singapore for some reason HATES salt. They don't put salt on fries from mcdonalds, so you always end up with a bag of soggy fries. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-heart-foundation-your-sodium-intake-might-be-silently-killing-you-how-much-is-too-much https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-hear... Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on them... https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805 https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805
        tillinghast 4y ago
        Throw some sriracha on that BK PB burger and that would be _magnificent_.
        exikyut 4y ago
        *Adds "peanut butter and sriracha" to list of improbable combinations to investigate*
        antod 4y ago
        You could pretend it was satay?
        tillinghast 4y ago
        It is beautiful. Do it. Works best with sweetish-savory items. I first stumbled upon it when I put peanut butter & Sriracha on an omelette filled with pork sausage, bacon, and browned onions / mushrooms.
    - eddof13 4y ago
      I wonder if that's particular to Asia, because I've noticed McDonalds is the same as the US in Latin America (gringo safe space), aside from a couple extra menu items
  - goodoldneon 4y ago
    McDonalds’ fries are actually good. But point taken
    - beckingz 4y ago
      They're hot fries. Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always good. In 30 minutes? Not good fries.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). The fries in Belgium are by far the best, but there are some great ones here in Germany.
        beckingz 4y ago
        I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day. Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries everywhere. Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the value prop of fast food.
        lostlogin 4y ago
        What they do in the UK is horrifying. The soggy oily mass that you eat with a prong thing. I even went to the current winner of ‘best fish and chips’ that year, in Whitby. Argh.
        bowsamic 4y ago
        UK chips are my favourite in the world, but they are qualitatively different in every way. I always get annoyed when other countries claim to copy fish and chips but serve them with fries. There isn't anywhere else in the world that you can get chips like that, so inevitably the fish and chips that try and copy it are always disappointing. I know it's controversial, but are supposed to be soggy and oily, not crunchy. It's supposed to be like eating oily potatoes. There is a reason why fish and chips is so renowned and loved, and the chips are a big part of it. They are the best in the world bar none. I only didn't mention it earlier because people find it quite offensive, because they are so much different from other chips.
  - rolisz 4y ago
    But unfortunately not true in other countries! In Hong Kong the menu is very different and even the fries are different!
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    mc donald in italy has espresso and croissants
- valleyer 4y ago
  Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the UI of their OSes on an annual basis.
  - MaxPengwing 4y ago
    Not on things that makes people feel like they can find what they are looking for. The Apple drop down menu hasn't changed its place since the original Mac OS. The UI skin might change a bit from year to year, but the UX of Key components haven't changed much for 40 years. Used to work at AppleCare special programs support in Ireland, and when we did change something like hide certain menues in the Server appbecasue we wanted to disincentive usage of parts that were going to be depricated, all hell brekas loose with the older sysadmins calling in furious over having to read change notes. Thing is Apple makes sure to communicate a lot of these changes in emails sent to users, in change notes, and in popups, and people just refuse to take notice. Or when Final Cut Pro X changed it's library management. There were good reasons for these changes, but people at first hated them since it disturbed an otherwise uninterrupted workflow. But when these changes are made, it's usually for a very good reason based on user feedback. This did however highlight a serious behavioural issue with the users. Some users rarely update, so they never get the incremental changes, and instead opt to jump 3-5 major release versions which breaks everything. This in turn makes the user wary of ANY updates as they now associate it with breaking everything and changing everything. Which is a problem that they would not have if they did follow best update practices. I saw the exact same issue at HPE, Nikon, Salesforce, Microsoft, when I worked there.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you'll never learn a constantly changing one.
  - MaxPengwing 4y ago
    Very true. This is why I rage quit Using Windows at Windows 8... adn barely accept the horrific state of Win 10. Im particularly pissed off about having system preference settings in at least 4 different places that are all counter intuitive. I really liked windows 7, and was grumpy about first using Mac OS, but what won me over was that I didn't have to fight the OS in finding what I was looking for in settings. Also the reason why I like Linux and BSD. there is a standard to where you find the setting files.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  > Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it. I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an iPhone app on macOS.
  - MaxPengwing 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by that? The UI/UX design of the System Preferences hasn't really changed since Snow Leopard imho. Cant speak to much about before Snow Leopard as that predates my personal experience. I'd love to get an example of what you mean?
SkyMarshal 4y ago
Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think”, and any changes, even improvements, reset that.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing. Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me. Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this is having multiple different interface options available. For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or wanting to do it without your browser slowing down as much, the old interface is still available: https://www.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ Many out there will stop using the site the day when the old interface goes down and for now can just use the old one despite the new one being available - thus allowing them to stick to the user experience that they're used to. Of course, not many out there want to deal with something like this on the development side, such as CRUD systems that would need to move fields around, add new business process steps etc. There, maintaining two separate versions would be a massive pain.
    - alexalx666 4y ago
      old design is easier to process. not sure if its just me but seems like the new design wants to tell me what's important and I have to fight it spending precious brain cycles
    - yamazakiwi 4y ago
_fat_santa 4y ago
I have a rule now that when designing a page, any "money screens" get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a "money screen" as anything that leads a company to land a client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A/B testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region that the biz operates. Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won't loose a shit load of money in the future. [1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...
- mgav 4y ago
  In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because they were truly incompetent traders.
papito 4y ago
This is a good example of why some people have zero business being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision has real consequences - this happens. Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge change to a money-making project on a "round" date is suicidal. They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health insurance.
pc86 4y ago
> Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did. I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely should know by now that doing this has the potential for a huge impact.
killion 4y ago
That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion rate of the website before and after the redesign.
- GrumpyNl 4y ago
  There is a graph at the bottom that shows the conversion before and after the redesign.
  - killion 4y ago
    Thanks! Sorry I had missed that.

jessermeyer 4y ago

Was there ever a follow up to help determine why? Were repeat customers returning and panicked when they saw a new, and unexpected, layout change?

MaxPengwing 4y ago

Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it. People hate changes to their workflow.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand. Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...
  - spcebar 4y ago
    I wonder if this is an intentional choice to adapt to the tastes of local markets?
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      I would assume so, Singapore for some reason HATES salt. They don't put salt on fries from mcdonalds, so you always end up with a bag of soggy fries. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-heart-foundation-your-sodium-intake-might-be-silently-killing-you-how-much-is-too-much https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-hear... Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on them... https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805 https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805
      - tillinghast 4y ago
        Throw some sriracha on that BK PB burger and that would be _magnificent_.
        exikyut 4y ago
        *Adds "peanut butter and sriracha" to list of improbable combinations to investigate*
        antod 4y ago
        You could pretend it was satay?
        tillinghast 4y ago
        It is beautiful. Do it. Works best with sweetish-savory items. I first stumbled upon it when I put peanut butter & Sriracha on an omelette filled with pork sausage, bacon, and browned onions / mushrooms.
  - eddof13 4y ago
    I wonder if that's particular to Asia, because I've noticed McDonalds is the same as the US in Latin America (gringo safe space), aside from a couple extra menu items
- goodoldneon 4y ago
  McDonalds’ fries are actually good. But point taken
  - beckingz 4y ago
    They're hot fries. Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always good. In 30 minutes? Not good fries.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). The fries in Belgium are by far the best, but there are some great ones here in Germany.
      - beckingz 4y ago
        I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day. Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries everywhere. Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the value prop of fast food.
        lostlogin 4y ago
        What they do in the UK is horrifying. The soggy oily mass that you eat with a prong thing. I even went to the current winner of ‘best fish and chips’ that year, in Whitby. Argh.
        bowsamic 4y ago
        UK chips are my favourite in the world, but they are qualitatively different in every way. I always get annoyed when other countries claim to copy fish and chips but serve them with fries. There isn't anywhere else in the world that you can get chips like that, so inevitably the fish and chips that try and copy it are always disappointing. I know it's controversial, but are supposed to be soggy and oily, not crunchy. It's supposed to be like eating oily potatoes. There is a reason why fish and chips is so renowned and loved, and the chips are a big part of it. They are the best in the world bar none. I only didn't mention it earlier because people find it quite offensive, because they are so much different from other chips.
- rolisz 4y ago
  But unfortunately not true in other countries! In Hong Kong the menu is very different and even the fries are different!
- LtWorf 4y ago
  mc donald in italy has espresso and croissants
valleyer 4y ago
Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the UI of their OSes on an annual basis.
- MaxPengwing 4y ago
  Not on things that makes people feel like they can find what they are looking for. The Apple drop down menu hasn't changed its place since the original Mac OS. The UI skin might change a bit from year to year, but the UX of Key components haven't changed much for 40 years. Used to work at AppleCare special programs support in Ireland, and when we did change something like hide certain menues in the Server appbecasue we wanted to disincentive usage of parts that were going to be depricated, all hell brekas loose with the older sysadmins calling in furious over having to read change notes. Thing is Apple makes sure to communicate a lot of these changes in emails sent to users, in change notes, and in popups, and people just refuse to take notice. Or when Final Cut Pro X changed it's library management. There were good reasons for these changes, but people at first hated them since it disturbed an otherwise uninterrupted workflow. But when these changes are made, it's usually for a very good reason based on user feedback. This did however highlight a serious behavioural issue with the users. Some users rarely update, so they never get the incremental changes, and instead opt to jump 3-5 major release versions which breaks everything. This in turn makes the user wary of ANY updates as they now associate it with breaking everything and changing everything. Which is a problem that they would not have if they did follow best update practices. I saw the exact same issue at HPE, Nikon, Salesforce, Microsoft, when I worked there.
ridgered4 4y ago
You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you'll never learn a constantly changing one.
- MaxPengwing 4y ago
  Very true. This is why I rage quit Using Windows at Windows 8... adn barely accept the horrific state of Win 10. Im particularly pissed off about having system preference settings in at least 4 different places that are all counter intuitive. I really liked windows 7, and was grumpy about first using Mac OS, but what won me over was that I didn't have to fight the OS in finding what I was looking for in settings. Also the reason why I like Linux and BSD. there is a standard to where you find the setting files.
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
> Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it. I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an iPhone app on macOS.
- MaxPengwing 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean by that? The UI/UX design of the System Preferences hasn't really changed since Snow Leopard imho. Cant speak to much about before Snow Leopard as that predates my personal experience. I'd love to get an example of what you mean?

SkyMarshal 4y ago

Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think”, and any changes, even improvements, reset that.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing. Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me. Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this is having multiple different interface options available. For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or wanting to do it without your browser slowing down as much, the old interface is still available: https://www.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ Many out there will stop using the site the day when the old interface goes down and for now can just use the old one despite the new one being available - thus allowing them to stick to the user experience that they're used to. Of course, not many out there want to deal with something like this on the development side, such as CRUD systems that would need to move fields around, add new business process steps etc. There, maintaining two separate versions would be a massive pain.
  - alexalx666 4y ago
    old design is easier to process. not sure if its just me but seems like the new design wants to tell me what's important and I have to fight it spending precious brain cycles
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago

_fat_santa 4y ago

I have a rule now that when designing a page, any "money screens" get at least 1.5X to 2X the estimate. I define a "money screen" as anything that leads a company to land a client or land a sale, things like checkout flows, signup flows, etc. Usually that extra time gets sucked up in A/B testing setup and setting up a staggered deployment per region that the biz operates. Whenever customers push back I tell them the story of Knight Capital [1]. You pay extra for extra assurance that you won't loose a shit load of money in the future. [1]: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...

mgav 4y ago
In the early 2000s I was a professional day trader and Knight was a market-making firm. EVERY single person I dealt with was an absolute crook, happy to break rules and do disgustingly horrible things to enrich themselves, because they were truly incompetent traders.

papito 4y ago

This is a good example of why some people have zero business being anywhere near management. They win the birth lottery and have it easy all their lives by sheer luck, but when a decision has real consequences - this happens. Anyone in the trenches could tell you that rolling out a huge change to a money-making project on a "round" date is suicidal. They just have no idea of what they are doing in the first place - just playing darts - and it usually works due to the ants killing themselves, to make it all happen. Because health insurance.

pc86 4y ago

> Nobody considered that rearranging the layout and colors of the checkout buttons would have such an impact but they did. I hope this was two decades ago because people absolutely should know by now that doing this has the potential for a huge impact.

killion 4y ago

That is why I was hoping the article would have the conversion rate of the website before and after the redesign.

GrumpyNl 4y ago
There is a graph at the bottom that shows the conversion before and after the redesign.
- killion 4y ago
  Thanks! Sorry I had missed that.