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I hear you that as users we appreciate more stable UI, but to get to an intuitive UI, you have to experiment and iterate. But there is no rule that says you ha

I hear you that as users we appreciate more stable UI, but to get to an intuitive UI, you have to experiment and iterate. But there is no rule that says you have to do those experiments in production and annoy your paying customers who don't want to see them. If you didn't insist on releasing every five minutes you'd have time to iterate privately. Successful software was made this way for decades before modern web applications came along and frankly a lot of it had better UI/UX than a lot of the junk that gets pushed out today. While there is value in discrete and planned releases, we value responding to change more. I suppose the question is what change you're responding to. In this situation it seems like a lot of that change and the need to respond to it are self-inflicted damage.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Surely feature flags are a way to iterate privately even while shipping the code?
- Silhouette 4y ago
  That depends on who gets to decide when the flags get turned on, doesn't it?
brianmcc 4y ago
+1 for "let's run this big UI change using our TEST platform past some physical rooms full of typical users to see if they hate it" rather than just firing it into prod with some buzzwords to justify traumatising millions of previously satisfied customers! Personal favourite was Spotify removing their playback widget to "improve the customer experience" and oh my God the backlash was ferocious. It was entirely moronic and screamed of Product Manager -> Customer with zero actual user feedback gathering: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Android-Widget-Removal/td-p/4800301 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Android-Widget-Remo... 26 pages of complaints produced this response, basically we removed a thing you love and use constantly, but you can vote for it as a feature request: "We always take retiring features in Spotify very seriously, and do want your continued feedback. The best way for us to measure your comments are via votes in our Idea Exchange. For this reason we're going to lock this thread. We encourage you to move to the Idea Exchange area where you can vote and comment on feature requests." Approaches and terms like "iterating fast", "responding to change", I dunno, just feels like a poor substitute for better planning and evaluation because those can be hard.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  The irony is that it often takes only a tiny number of test users to spot a glaring usability problem that could sink a major UI change. Someone (possibly the Nielsen Norman Group?) did some research on this a while ago and found that even single digits of test users would be enough to collect very useful feedback. People are so obsessed with scale and techniques like A/B testing today that they seem to forget that kind of test can only tell you whether one of the options is significantly better. It can't tell you whether you're finding the best choice between excellent options or the least of evils between dreadful ones.
  - brianmcc 4y ago
    Totally. You could imagine even a tiny handful of trusted users who consistently give valuable, reliable, feedback. Microsoft seems a company just oblivious to user feedback - Beta users howling about disastrous Windows changes mooted, and they just.... ignore them. I don't get it.
int_19h 4y ago
> frankly a lot of it had better UI/UX than a lot of the junk that gets pushed out today. I feel like this is the key point that adherents of modern development practices need to address. We've been sold a lot of stuff on the basis that it would drastically improve the user experience - but a lot of people, myself included, feel that UX actually declined in the past two decades.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  I think software quality has fallen in many areas - including UI/UX - as a result of widespread Internet access. It's no longer assumed that anything actually has to work when you ship it because you can always fix it with a software update later. There's no need to do real usability research before you ship because you can always spy on users later. Unfortunately this seems to have created a culture where little that ships was really ready - at least not to the standards we used to consider acceptable. Everyone is busy pushing out new features and other visible changes every ten seconds. But somehow no-one ever finds the time to go back and fix the substandard quality that got an MVP in front of users on launch day. Google even warned us about this years ago. Remember in its early days everything was Google XYZ Beta? It was an excuse to ship stuff with substandard quality then and it still is now. We're just less honest about it now.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

Surely feature flags are a way to iterate privately even while shipping the code?

Silhouette 4y ago
That depends on who gets to decide when the flags get turned on, doesn't it?

brianmcc 4y ago

+1 for "let's run this big UI change using our TEST platform past some physical rooms full of typical users to see if they hate it" rather than just firing it into prod with some buzzwords to justify traumatising millions of previously satisfied customers! Personal favourite was Spotify removing their playback widget to "improve the customer experience" and oh my God the backlash was ferocious. It was entirely moronic and screamed of Product Manager -> Customer with zero actual user feedback gathering: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Android-Widget-Removal/td-p/4800301 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Android-Widget-Remo... 26 pages of complaints produced this response, basically we removed a thing you love and use constantly, but you can vote for it as a feature request: "We always take retiring features in Spotify very seriously, and do want your continued feedback. The best way for us to measure your comments are via votes in our Idea Exchange. For this reason we're going to lock this thread. We encourage you to move to the Idea Exchange area where you can vote and comment on feature requests." Approaches and terms like "iterating fast", "responding to change", I dunno, just feels like a poor substitute for better planning and evaluation because those can be hard.

Silhouette 4y ago
The irony is that it often takes only a tiny number of test users to spot a glaring usability problem that could sink a major UI change. Someone (possibly the Nielsen Norman Group?) did some research on this a while ago and found that even single digits of test users would be enough to collect very useful feedback. People are so obsessed with scale and techniques like A/B testing today that they seem to forget that kind of test can only tell you whether one of the options is significantly better. It can't tell you whether you're finding the best choice between excellent options or the least of evils between dreadful ones.
- brianmcc 4y ago
  Totally. You could imagine even a tiny handful of trusted users who consistently give valuable, reliable, feedback. Microsoft seems a company just oblivious to user feedback - Beta users howling about disastrous Windows changes mooted, and they just.... ignore them. I don't get it.

int_19h 4y ago

> frankly a lot of it had better UI/UX than a lot of the junk that gets pushed out today. I feel like this is the key point that adherents of modern development practices need to address. We've been sold a lot of stuff on the basis that it would drastically improve the user experience - but a lot of people, myself included, feel that UX actually declined in the past two decades.

Silhouette 4y ago
I think software quality has fallen in many areas - including UI/UX - as a result of widespread Internet access. It's no longer assumed that anything actually has to work when you ship it because you can always fix it with a software update later. There's no need to do real usability research before you ship because you can always spy on users later. Unfortunately this seems to have created a culture where little that ships was really ready - at least not to the standards we used to consider acceptable. Everyone is busy pushing out new features and other visible changes every ten seconds. But somehow no-one ever finds the time to go back and fix the substandard quality that got an MVP in front of users on launch day. Google even warned us about this years ago. Remember in its early days everything was Google XYZ Beta? It was an excuse to ship stuff with substandard quality then and it still is now. We're just less honest about it now.