13 ms·

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive over

by mcluck 4y ago

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

matsemann 4y ago
Because the new UX feels more geared towards looking like VSCode, than actually improving things.
jdbernard 4y ago
This isn't really JetBrains fault, but the track record of products making full redesigns is bad enough that we do tend to assume that the priorities, values, and considerations of UX professionals run contrary to developers/users priorities, to the point where the result is often less useful/ergonomic than what it replaced. To be fair, this tendency to prioritize your own values above those of your users is not unique to designers. For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace."
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  > For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace." Wait, what? Is that meant as a counterexample?
  - Retric 4y ago
    He wouldn’t say it so often if developers didn’t break userspace.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      Gotcha.
Olreich 4y ago
I think you would be shocked at how often UX designers get greenlit to make a refresh based on vague things like the current code base being hard to use or keeping up with the Joneses of other products or just to have new marketing pictures that look "modern". The default assumption that this effort was made without proper consideration is right more often than its wrong. Maligning the devs? Not so much. Wanting them to show their work and explain why they think looking more like VSCode is a good idea? Very much so.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > I think you would be shocked at how often UX designers get greenlit to make a refresh based on vague things like the current code base being hard to use or keeping up with the Joneses of other products or just to have new marketing pictures that look "modern". Not JetBrains, but I worked at a small app company that embarked on multiple UX re-dos for the vaguest of reasons. If your company has a charismatic VP of Design who has the CEO's ear, you're going to be spending your time on UX rewrites yearly. "It's not modern or sleek! It doesn't pop enough! We need to change our branding so it's fresher! Or, Users are confused with our current design! (without qualitative or quantitative user studies that show this)" It's never a measured attribute that they want to change. If you were a digital artist or interaction designer, you would have been able to build a great portfolio there in a matter of a few years.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Even with UX studies, it's very easy for people to get the answer they want or draw the conclusion they want to. Worked for a company that went full circle multiple times on its UI for what was ultimately a very large form between a single page with collapsible modules and tabbed UI layouts as the UX feedback oscillated between "Users don't know all these options are there and we want them to discover them because they keep asking us to implement features we already have" and "Users are overwhelmed by the number of options on screen"
  - andirk 4y ago
    Bless their hearts, UI Designers. Just remodeled my kitchen and had to actively dodge my designers' and showrooms' recommendations of a "modern" look which is basically all white or make it look like a friggin office morgue. It's not flashy but it is very utility-first and is beautiful. I aimed for something that _wouldn't_ need to change visually with the times. UI Design is often the exact opposite: showcase that your property is on the bleeding edge of design. I wonder what they'll do once they realize you can only round a corner so much.
bmacho 4y ago
> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. I suppose it is human nature to randomly change things (see the other submission about gardening (continuous small changes are different from big changes time to time, still equally annoying)), also a result of the free market, there are too many UX people for coming up new products and make them final. I bet if architects could change the buildings in minutes and for free, now we all lived in constantly changing (but obviously not improving) buildings.
soulofmischief 4y ago
> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Why does this surprise you when it happens all of the time? As a UX professional myself this is one of the banes of my existence. Consider it's less often a "team of UX professionals" who make these decisions, and more often the manager of the month passing out a resume item.
eitland 4y ago
It might not be fair to group the UX designers of Jetbrains with every other UX designer. But it is a giant problem that the industry has been "simplifying" everything so mindlessly for so many years that today my iOS device gave me a legitimate prompt that just didn't contain enough information to decide about at all. Something along the lines of "Change in app administration [...] will you allow [...] to administer Gmail [...] Your data will be administered." Now tell me: is this thing going to administer my private mails? 2 factor verification? (Yes, Google often use their mail app for that.) etc etc. At this point it is utterly meaningless: the only correct thing to do with such a vague prompt is to say no until an explanation has been given. But I can surely imagine UX developers patting themselves and each others on the back for such a brilliant simple design. To be fair, good UX designers exist, but everytime I hear about ux-designers near any of my products I get a little scared :-)
lalopalota 4y ago
> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. It's not "just for fun". If the UX doesn't get updated, then they are out of a job.
dbsmith83 4y ago
How do you explain the current UI shit hole that we live in these days then? It surely wasn't to increase productivity or user experience. UIs in the 90's were more functional and flexible than the UIs of today.
0x445442 4y ago
> UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. I’d say they were doing it because they were getting paid for doing it. But that doesn’t mean it actually needed doing. What I have found in tech especially is that a product may get to a point where it’s meeting all its functional goals and really only needs small tweaks and fixes. But this is at odds with company growth. I’m not saying this is the case here but it’s prevalent in this industry.
piokoch 4y ago
It didn't have to be UX team. It could have been some marketing genius that came to UX team and told them that his nephew is using new funky, black background IDE called VS Code, which is all the hottest nowadays, so IntelliJ HAS TO catch up, should become modern, trendy and fun again, so it will bring more sales. I only hope nephew didn't mention Electron backend.
- Macha 4y ago
  You joke about Electron but IntelliJ's Swing based UI doesn't feel more responsive and if they'd change it to cache or make async whatever it's spending a minute doing on startup then I could actually consider using it for more than just Java
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
You say that but I try not to update my iphone as long as possible because I got tired of them deciding the random button on the music player needed to be hidden behind some menu somewhere. The best part is that it was checked on when the update happened and I had no way to turn it off. So yeah, fuck giving them the benefit of the doubt. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt. If it turns out not to be 90% gratuitous changes it will be the anomaly, not the rule. They don't deserve that benefit of the doubt at this point.
MockObject 4y ago
> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Not fun, but giving themselves work. Unfortunately, no UI team ever got rewarded for leaving a good product alone. They're hired to work, so they work. Anyone old enough has seen the quality of certain products peak and then decline, after the company just couldn't leave well enough alone, and ruined excellence with needless tampering. I've hung on to various applications long after their EOL because the new versions were really worse. History is replete with great websites absolutely ruined by redesigns. This field needs more of an old traditional craftsman appreciation for excellence.
- emeril 4y ago
  I used Office 2003 until I was forced to use Windows 10 for work at which point, despite my best efforts, was sufficiently incompatible, that I "upgraded" to Office 2010 which seems, I suppose, the least bad "modern" office version... I still miss Office 2003, it was so much better than new versions
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    LibreOffice has the "old" UI which I find way easier to navigate. I'll use that until I can't on any given document. Has saved me lots of time.
norwalkbear 4y ago
Why do you defer automatically to authority? It's not offensive to question it, and you trying to police people with legitimate grievance is disgusting.
smsm42 4y ago
Because many of UI redesigns I have witnessed with tools and sites I spend a lot of time on were for the worse. Somehow it being done by UX professionals is not a guarantee that I, as a user, would benefit from it. I can't begin to guess what the motivations were, I just know the results.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. And it's experience that says that they do. Maybe not for fun, but for another 3, 6, 9 mos of pay.

by mcluck 4y ago

matsemann 4y ago

Because the new UX feels more geared towards looking like VSCode, than actually improving things.

jdbernard 4y ago

This isn't really JetBrains fault, but the track record of products making full redesigns is bad enough that we do tend to assume that the priorities, values, and considerations of UX professionals run contrary to developers/users priorities, to the point where the result is often less useful/ergonomic than what it replaced. To be fair, this tendency to prioritize your own values above those of your users is not unique to designers. For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace."

bornfreddy 4y ago
> For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace." Wait, what? Is that meant as a counterexample?
- Retric 4y ago
  He wouldn’t say it so often if developers didn’t break userspace.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Gotcha.

Olreich 4y ago

I think you would be shocked at how often UX designers get greenlit to make a refresh based on vague things like the current code base being hard to use or keeping up with the Joneses of other products or just to have new marketing pictures that look "modern". The default assumption that this effort was made without proper consideration is right more often than its wrong. Maligning the devs? Not so much. Wanting them to show their work and explain why they think looking more like VSCode is a good idea? Very much so.

ryandrake 4y ago
> I think you would be shocked at how often UX designers get greenlit to make a refresh based on vague things like the current code base being hard to use or keeping up with the Joneses of other products or just to have new marketing pictures that look "modern". Not JetBrains, but I worked at a small app company that embarked on multiple UX re-dos for the vaguest of reasons. If your company has a charismatic VP of Design who has the CEO's ear, you're going to be spending your time on UX rewrites yearly. "It's not modern or sleek! It doesn't pop enough! We need to change our branding so it's fresher! Or, Users are confused with our current design! (without qualitative or quantitative user studies that show this)" It's never a measured attribute that they want to change. If you were a digital artist or interaction designer, you would have been able to build a great portfolio there in a matter of a few years.
- Macha 4y ago
  Even with UX studies, it's very easy for people to get the answer they want or draw the conclusion they want to. Worked for a company that went full circle multiple times on its UI for what was ultimately a very large form between a single page with collapsible modules and tabbed UI layouts as the UX feedback oscillated between "Users don't know all these options are there and we want them to discover them because they keep asking us to implement features we already have" and "Users are overwhelmed by the number of options on screen"
- andirk 4y ago
  Bless their hearts, UI Designers. Just remodeled my kitchen and had to actively dodge my designers' and showrooms' recommendations of a "modern" look which is basically all white or make it look like a friggin office morgue. It's not flashy but it is very utility-first and is beautiful. I aimed for something that _wouldn't_ need to change visually with the times. UI Design is often the exact opposite: showcase that your property is on the bleeding edge of design. I wonder what they'll do once they realize you can only round a corner so much.

bmacho 4y ago

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. I suppose it is human nature to randomly change things (see the other submission about gardening (continuous small changes are different from big changes time to time, still equally annoying)), also a result of the free market, there are too many UX people for coming up new products and make them final. I bet if architects could change the buildings in minutes and for free, now we all lived in constantly changing (but obviously not improving) buildings.

soulofmischief 4y ago

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Why does this surprise you when it happens all of the time? As a UX professional myself this is one of the banes of my existence. Consider it's less often a "team of UX professionals" who make these decisions, and more often the manager of the month passing out a resume item.

eitland 4y ago

It might not be fair to group the UX designers of Jetbrains with every other UX designer. But it is a giant problem that the industry has been "simplifying" everything so mindlessly for so many years that today my iOS device gave me a legitimate prompt that just didn't contain enough information to decide about at all. Something along the lines of "Change in app administration [...] will you allow [...] to administer Gmail [...] Your data will be administered." Now tell me: is this thing going to administer my private mails? 2 factor verification? (Yes, Google often use their mail app for that.) etc etc. At this point it is utterly meaningless: the only correct thing to do with such a vague prompt is to say no until an explanation has been given. But I can surely imagine UX developers patting themselves and each others on the back for such a brilliant simple design. To be fair, good UX designers exist, but everytime I hear about ux-designers near any of my products I get a little scared :-)

lalopalota 4y ago

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. It's not "just for fun". If the UX doesn't get updated, then they are out of a job.

dbsmith83 4y ago

How do you explain the current UI shit hole that we live in these days then? It surely wasn't to increase productivity or user experience. UIs in the 90's were more functional and flexible than the UIs of today.

0x445442 4y ago

> UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. I’d say they were doing it because they were getting paid for doing it. But that doesn’t mean it actually needed doing. What I have found in tech especially is that a product may get to a point where it’s meeting all its functional goals and really only needs small tweaks and fixes. But this is at odds with company growth. I’m not saying this is the case here but it’s prevalent in this industry.

piokoch 4y ago

It didn't have to be UX team. It could have been some marketing genius that came to UX team and told them that his nephew is using new funky, black background IDE called VS Code, which is all the hottest nowadays, so IntelliJ HAS TO catch up, should become modern, trendy and fun again, so it will bring more sales. I only hope nephew didn't mention Electron backend.

Macha 4y ago
You joke about Electron but IntelliJ's Swing based UI doesn't feel more responsive and if they'd change it to cache or make async whatever it's spending a minute doing on startup then I could actually consider using it for more than just Java

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

You say that but I try not to update my iphone as long as possible because I got tired of them deciding the random button on the music player needed to be hidden behind some menu somewhere. The best part is that it was checked on when the update happened and I had no way to turn it off. So yeah, fuck giving them the benefit of the doubt. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt. If it turns out not to be 90% gratuitous changes it will be the anomaly, not the rule. They don't deserve that benefit of the doubt at this point.

MockObject 4y ago

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Not fun, but giving themselves work. Unfortunately, no UI team ever got rewarded for leaving a good product alone. They're hired to work, so they work. Anyone old enough has seen the quality of certain products peak and then decline, after the company just couldn't leave well enough alone, and ruined excellence with needless tampering. I've hung on to various applications long after their EOL because the new versions were really worse. History is replete with great websites absolutely ruined by redesigns. This field needs more of an old traditional craftsman appreciation for excellence.

emeril 4y ago
I used Office 2003 until I was forced to use Windows 10 for work at which point, despite my best efforts, was sufficiently incompatible, that I "upgraded" to Office 2010 which seems, I suppose, the least bad "modern" office version... I still miss Office 2003, it was so much better than new versions
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  LibreOffice has the "old" UI which I find way easier to navigate. I'll use that until I can't on any given document. Has saved me lots of time.

norwalkbear 4y ago

Why do you defer automatically to authority? It's not offensive to question it, and you trying to police people with legitimate grievance is disgusting.

smsm42 4y ago

Because many of UI redesigns I have witnessed with tools and sites I spend a lot of time on were for the worse. Somehow it being done by UX professionals is not a guarantee that I, as a user, would benefit from it. I can't begin to guess what the motivations were, I just know the results.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. And it's experience that says that they do. Maybe not for fun, but for another 3, 6, 9 mos of pay.