No, 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 Po

No, 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.