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Users hate change

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Re: Users hate change

#101

Post by Ntrails »

johnday wrote: post #33

It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they…

> Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss

I mean, I pretty much hated everything Facebook did since I used to have an actual news feed of things my friends did/said. Peoples profiles stopped being a place to go and put things. Conversations moved from wall to wall, to comments with the stupidest fucking nesting and ui I've ever seen.

I never really used twitter - so can't comment - but facebook drove me off their platform as much as I outgrew it.

As for noise/fuss - Twitter is a shouting platform where things snowball in a different way.

Re: Users hate change

#102

Post by aeorgnoieang »

yoz-y wrote: post #82
donclark wrote: post #48

Why not allow users to toggle btwn versions of software/UI/etc?

Because in many cases this is not possible. For example when Twitter added polls no other client than the default one was able to display them. If they kept some older version around they would not have feature parity. Then they introduced threads, these would look weird. Now imagine if they introduced nesting, the database model could change in a way that all older versions would require a substantial update. Mainta…

It would probably be only marginally more expensive (for Twitter specifically) for them to add changes in a way that's backwards compatible with older clients, so I don't think this argument is particularly convincing. I think, because it's somewhat plausible, they pushed it, but because they really wanted to control all of the clients, to increase their advertising revenue.

Re: Users hate change

#103

Post by johnday »

mschuster91 wrote: post #35
johnday wrote: post #33

It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they…

> Twitter's updates are very transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience for any sector of the market. The only improvement seems to be that the new UI supports multiple accounts - something which I solve by using different Chrome profiles, much safer.

The old UI also supported multiple accounts, and quite well. Now I wouldn't know where to click.

Re: Users hate change

#104

Post by johnday »

wycy wrote: post #74
johnday wrote: post #33

It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and Twitter respectively. Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really notice and they…

People do hate change, regardless of how much better that change is. I don't think I've ever seen a UI redesign over which users didn't get into a massive uproar. I certainly saw the massive uproar any time FB introduced a UI change. Sure, some UI redesigns are just plain bad and users are justified in hating them. The twitter redesign does appear to be clunky/bad as you noted. The new Reddit seems to be another case…

I think there's a difference (moreover, a percievable difference) between a UI redesign which users hate and a UI redesign which users merely complain about. People love complaining and will happily point out the rough edges of anything put in their eyeline, but that's not the same thing as disliking it in a vacuum.

Re: Users hate change

#105

Post by dfps »

Yes, but users will accept it and be satisfied if the change is good. How manu of us have tools we continue to use (or long for when using alternatives) because they worked so well.

Most tech seems to ignore usability, though.

Samsung galaxy updates suck.

Korg Electribe rules.

Re: Users hate change

#106

Post by wongarsu »

rjf72 wrote: post #41
DougN7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping bean counters shouldn’t be the goal, but everyone does like to keep eating. What do you suggest for keeping the business healthy while not making things terrible?

One might argue that the current system is making things much more terrible than any alternative. Software as a service makes sense for some things. But for the majority of things its now being used for, its only purpose is rent seeking. Cryptocurrencies offer an interesting balance between rent seeking and consumer friendliness. You use a piece of software, it mines for coins which are transferred to the company. Th…

> Not really sure how you'd achieve that latter part without simply constantly changing the algorithm

For many crypto currencies being resistant to ASIC and even GPU miners is an explicit goal since it promotes decentralisation (everyone has a CPU, few have Asics). The usual way to achieve this is to make memory the bottleneck. ASICs are great for speeding up computation and massively parallelising it, but if the bottleneck is not compute but memory or even better memory bandwidth then an ASIC can't have a big advantage.

Re: Users hate change

#107

Post by wycy »

camgunz wrote: post #95
wycy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do hate change, regardless of how much better that change is. I don't think I've ever seen a UI redesign over which users didn't get into a massive uproar. I certainly saw the massive uproar any time FB introduced a UI change. Sure, some UI redesigns are just plain bad and users are justified in hating them. The twitter redesign does appear to be clunky/bad as you noted. The new Reddit seems to be another case…

I liked Windows 7 so much more than Windows Vista I probably can't express it. Same when Firefox moved to a slimmer UI. Anecdata, of course, but "users will unfailingly hate ever major redesign without fail regardless of how much better it is" seems impossible to substantiate.

Not all users, but a large coalition of very vocal users--far more vocal than the coalition that likes any given change.

I'm in the apparent minority of people who generally likes most UI redesigns.

- Like you, I also liked Windows 7 immediately. And I liked Windows 10 immediately. (We don't speak of Windows 8--shudder)

- I generally thought every iteration of FB was better than the one before it.

- I liked the iOS redesign immediately. Now we're all so used to it, and now looking back iOS 6 looks like a janky toy, but most people hated iOS 7+.

- I liked the Office ribbon.

Re: Users hate change

#108

Post by ben509 »

MereInterest wrote: post #23
DougN7 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping bean counters shouldn’t be the goal, but everyone does like to keep eating. What do you suggest for keeping the business healthy while not making things terrible?

To start branching out into additional software. Rather than shoehorning a feature into a product that doesn't need it, make that feature be a standalone product.

This was the premise behind various component platforms, e.g. OLE, CORBA, OpenDoc which were, in many ways, the GUI equivalent of command line shells.

We could see a renaissance in that area if technologies similar to Electron and ubiquitous app stores make these more feasible.

(To toot my own horn, I think https://tenet-lang.org/ would be helpful in building well versioned APIs to allow intercommunication with shared semantics.)

Re: Users hate change

#109

Post by la_barba »

yoz-y wrote: post #70
flohofwoe wrote: post #5

My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to 'keep the team busy'. Instead o…

Subscription model is actually way better if you don't want to end up with feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever fix bugs and improve performance. If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.

That's a good point. I'm overall positive about subscription software, but I don't like the fact that it always seems to go hand in hand with DRM and other nonsense. I'd rather they take some modest amount per year and let me do whatever I want with the software. Its a headache to make the software work when the computer is on an isolated network and will never be connected to the internet. Office 365 I'm looking at you.. :P

Re: Users hate change

#110

Post by monkin »

People don't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them are lazy, and don't want to change their habits, no matter how bad they are.

I know from my experience, that most valuable users will contact you directly (e-mail, support, twitter, other way) to describe their experiences before and after the change, telling you what exactly hurts them.

Rest of them are pointless trolls with "First Comment Rule". What is that? First negative comment will spark negative discussion, so trolls spark them to pressure on company/product. There is a lot of companies that will write, "I am sorry", and will start to move backwards because of that.

How to live with that? Listen, adapt, yet don't care about everything or everyone. :)

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