6 ms·
UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)
- aurareturn 3y agoHe's right. The design should be integrated on small piece by small piece. You can have an overall vision. But don't change it all at once.
- dtagames 3y agoI agree. One piece of advice I like to give is, "Change only the one worst thing." Figure out what you (or, preferably, your users) hate most. Change only that one thing. Wash, rinse, repeat.
- wasteduniverse 3y agoCan anyone here explain why YouTube (namely the mobile interface) goes through a total redesign every 1-2 years? Is it just to earn some unknown manager another promotion? I'm getting really sick of it at this point.
- chownie 3y agoPretty much that, yep. There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube. There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWhat ideology is driving this?
- jdbernard 3y agoI assume OP didn't mean that a single overarching ideology was driving all if these changes, but rather that each of them individually is ideologically driven (and therefore immune to questioning). They all seem to be directly counter to the end-user's desires but are off-limits to redesign.
- chownie 3y agoPretty much what I had intended by that comment, yeah. YouTube know that the choices they've made are qualitatively bad because users overwhelmingly complained about them (dislike button being the most obvious example of that) ...but quantitatively numbers didn't go down enough to force any kind of retraction or even recognition of discontent, so now we're stuck with the results.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoThis is just what happens when groups of people work together.
- sungho_ 3y agoBut what about fixing the obvious, common, and annoying bugs in the web version? That doesn't count as an accomplishment?
- pie420 3y agothe bugs in the web version are intentional to get you to download the app. you should be smart enough to figure this out by now
- Pulcinella 3y agoIt's similar to the "shipping your org chart" problem. Constant redesigns means you are shipping your employee performance review and incentive structure.
- proc0 3y agoI think people are being a bit cynical with that take, although it's not completely unfounded. There are other factors like new technologies that are overall better, and also restructuring of teams due to people leaving and/or layoffs. What you end up with is a codebase or parts of the codebase that accumulate "damage" (or increase in entropy), and sometimes the easiest thing to do is to start something from scratch again. So yeah sometimes the path of least resistance is building something new.
- wasteduniverse 3y ago[dead]
- vrighter 3y agoit's called resume driven develobment
- rerdavies 3y agoPeople like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.
- julienreszka 3y agoThat’s just like your opinion man
- ffitch 3y agothe Dude abides
- dsgnr 3y ago[dead]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoJust wait 15 years and it'll be back in fashion. Aero Glass is already back!
- toastercat 3y agoIt's the other way around for me. The product that goes through more redesigns (and inevitably hides or drops features as a result) seems shakier. In comparison, I'm still using foobar2000 and Craigslist 20 years later.
- spcebar 3y agoIt depends on the product. If it's a site that you're directly making payments on, customers usually want to see something something that looks modern and recently updated. I don't have the wording for the survey question, but the result boiled down to old looking sites/creaky clunky sites are seen as less trustworthy to ecommerce buyers, at least the ones one of my former clients surveyed.
- ghaff 3y ago
- cainxinth 3y agoThis is a mostly fair and accurate take, but there is an element of cherry picking here. There are countless UI updates that you don’t notice or barely notice. When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.
- JohnFen 3y ago> When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains. All UI changes bring some amount of pain to existing users. People will accept that pain if the benefit of the change is greater than the cost, no matter how large or small the change is. The thing that's become common is for UI changes to happen that bring little, if any, benefit to the user.
- nostrademons 3y agoNo, UI redesigns are a waste of time for the user. They are very effective at getting the executives who sponsor them promoted, because they look great in a PowerPoint. The actual customer of an executive is the finance department, because they are the ones who actually control the headcount & budgets that an executive needs, and they are usually not the user. How the product works is often invisible to someone who is not a daily user, and financial analysts often don't have time to be power users in all the products they are evaluating. How it looks is very visible. Therefore, when deciding which projects to fund, they are often biased toward shiny. Notice that founder-run companies, and ones that are too small to have normal corporate functional separation, usually don't invest in visual redesigns unless the existing UI is really bad. Big corporations do it continuously.
- jmount 3y agoStrongly agree. No UI is really intuitive enough that there isn't a formal or informal learning and even training cost to it. Then the redesign invariably finds a new way to hide the controls (hamburger menus, ... menus, gosh knows what else).
- Arainach 3y agoAs a counterpoint, when you change the insides, no one notices: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39193 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39... >And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. “Look at Calc, same as it always was.”
- JohnFen 3y agoIf nobody notices massive technical internal improvements, that tells me that what was improved wasn't of great importance to the user in the first place. Perhaps those technical improvements were a waste of time, but perhaps those technical improvements benefited development without adversely impacting users. That would be an enormous "win" in my book. > Anyway, my point is that—whether you like it or not—if you don’t change the UI, nobody notices. That’s why so much effort is spent on new UI. I think this is wrong on two counts. First, if the change you made to the business logic really improved the things that users value, they'll absolutely notice even if the UI doesn't change. Second, that comment implies that one way or another, a user-noticeable change must happen. It could very well be that the software is ideal for its user base as-is and no change at all is preferable to change for change's sake.
- Arainach 3y ago"Second, that comment implies that one way or another, a user-noticeable change must happen. It could very well be that the software is ideal for its user base as-is and no change at all is preferable to change for change's sake." To quote the users: "but why should I pay for bug fixes?" User-noticeable change is essential.
- Bridged7756 3y agoVery often it just seems to be a rat race to have the most "trendy" UI. I'm not sure how it works internally, but trends change all the time and I think it would be in the best interest of a company like Google or Meta to have a "modern" style.
- ghaff 3y agoThough there are sometimes good reasons to do so, company brand (logo, typography, name, etc.) refreshes often come across as an employment program for designers. There are legit reasons--e.g. working better on mobile or reflecting that a company doesn't do what it used to do any longer. But I see the sort of redesign where a company subtly adjusted the hue of its logo and I'm like "Why?"
- rybosworld 3y ago> Do we have concrete evidence that what we are doing will provide benefit to the company or users, or just feel that it would be better if the UI was redesigned? This isn't specific to UI redesigns, or even to software in general. People have been doing things "just because" since before the discovery of fire.
- terpimost 3y ago> This is not a redesign, but good design The author asks about smooth redesign and gradual deployment. I guess like google docs do.
- carlottaludwig 3y ago[dead]
- kjkjadksj 3y agoWe really have two sorts of software: the immutable types that developers depend on to behave exactly as they did forty years ago, and then the slop relegated to the general public that seems to need a redesign every 5 years, much like the inside of a grocery store.
- proc0 3y agoMy take is that this happens because the industry at large, especially web, does not treat engineers as proper engineers, and instead makes engineers do all sorts of other work. This leads to the type of engineering work that accumulates a lot of damage relatively quickly and needs to be rewritten over and over again. The ideal engineering solution, even for UIs, should be something that is abstracted properly, written only once, and then accumulates new features without any friction whatsoever. The new features rest on top of the platform seamlessly, giving users more options with no downsides. A good UI, imho, is one that users can configure, it only adds new things and never take out existing features, and is robust, reliable and responsive. This is a serious technical challenge and most organizations are not setup in a way to solve this problem properly without the solution deteriorating and needing a rewrite... and yes in part it's because on the business side there is no perceptin that this is actually needed and so it is deemed easier to just rewrite and build something new every time.
- plywoodShadow 3y ago>A good UI, imho, is one that users can configure It is better if UI works good out of the box. Of course, it is impossible to adapt to everyone's preferences, but configuration should be not too complicated, otherwise most users will not configure anything
- deadghost 3y agoReddit comes to mind. Who knows how much money they spent on their redesign with users hating it and actively choosing to use their old site design YEARS after they rolled out their new design. I also run a site and when I ask people what I should improve next, nearly no one says design, even when the design is clearly not very good. An example of a site that never changes is Craigslist. I can't even recall the last time it looked different. It's probably overdue for a redesign even.
- kevincox 3y agoTo be fair Reddit needs a redesign. The existing UI is pretty good on desktop but sucks with smaller displays. Of course their last redesign was so bad that they are already working on a new one: https://sh.reddit.com/ https://sh.reddit.com/. It seems better so far, but lets hope it ships before they turn off old.reddit.com
- Bjartr 3y ago> but sucks with smaller displays. That's the system working as intended. Why would they invest in making the site better on smaller displays (i.e. mobile) when their priority is to get you to use the app? From the normal not long term enough business perspective, doing so could only cannabalize those conversions to the app that would have otherwise happened. And conversion rate from web to app is almost certainly a explicitly tracked metric.
- kevincox 3y agoI don't think it is. If this was the main goal they would have just done nothing. Instead they rolled out a design which sucks for both desktop as well as maintaining shittiness on mobile..
- nbzso 3y agoGetting a new car with a new design is a waste of time and resources. What is new after all? You have all you need. A box with engine, wheels and steering wheel. I am curious, what car model and from what year this gentleman uses? I hope everything around him is only made by following his advice and principle. There is a problem in UX/UI design. Twofold problem. Developers hate to work on frontend implementation, and designers have mediocre knowledge about their craft and refuse to think objectively. Both of the problems can be solved with actual effort in education. Instead, big corps are wasting money and energy to replace all of them. AI will solve all of this by removing capitalism, human expertise, and design. Right? Sidenote. Today, I have tried seven times to update my Mac Mini. After hours of fight with Apple logic, I give up. What's going on there?
- JohnFen 3y ago> Developers hate to work on frontend implementation I know a lot of developers who strongly prefer front-end work. I know a lot that hate it. A bit like how some developers prefer greenfield development and others prefer maintenance work. I don't think it's supportable to make a blanket declaration that all developers have the same tastes or interests.
- nbzso 3y ago>I don't think it's supportable to make a blanket declaration that all developers have the same tastes or interests. Let's make a poll. Why, when CSS is advanced as never before, devs are using Tailwind?
- JohnFen 3y agoYou're talking web development specifically here. I was talking about front-end work generally.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoIs it bad that I almost feel nostalgia at those old spambots in the comments? Ironically it's one of the few types of posts i don't think you could get an LLM to output.