If Facebook had read this in 2006, I'd still use it every day.
Users hate change
111–120 of 315 posts
Re: Users hate change
#112My 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…
The problem with your theory is that "peak version" is different for every user of the software.
Is that really a problem? Couldn't you calculate an average across users and us that as the peak measurement instead.
Re: Users hate change
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with your theory is that "peak version" is different for every user of the software.
Is that really a problem? Couldn't you calculate an average across users and us that as the peak measurement instead.
Yes, it's really a problem. An average fails to be the peak version for anyone, missing some features wanted by some users, and having too many features for other users.
Re: Users hate change
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you have competitors and they offer (niche) features that you suddenly want as well.
Once you get to the point where pretty much every new feature serves just a niche, plugins are the solution. If need one of a hundred niche features, it's great to have software that has it, and it's also really great to have softare that doesn't have the other 99 features; it's better from usability perspective if they don't get automatically added for me.
Just like Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, Microsoft backpedalled between 2011 and 2016 versions (those are for Mac) and removed a significant amount of functionality.
Files closed with the application no longer reopen, UI elements are gone, and, worse yet, you can't completely customize all of the possible keyboard shortcuts any more, you can't even find access to them.
To my understanding, this was for 2 reasons (excuses):
1. Some OS changes Apple made*
2. To push people to subscribe to office 365 and "gain" that functionality
* I paid full price for both 2011 and 2016 (and the corresponding windows office copies). 2011 still works on the most recent macOS with all of the functionality. So, claiming that Apple did something to make the feature of automatically reopening the documents you had open when you quit broken is bull. Their old version still does that on the new OS just fine (despite that little pop up claiming the software is incompatible...it still works, why not use it?)
After buying MS Office with removed functionality, I will sadly not be buying office again. Nor will I be subscribing to office 365, nor will I be supporting it in any corporate ecosystem. The files from the old versions are perfectly fine and when they no longer are, Libre office and (almost embarrassingly) Google docs will have to do.
I'm definitely not the only one bailing. My father has been off for many years and, as a principal engineer at a Silicon Valley medical device company he helps others see that we don't need to let Microsoft maintain a stranglehold on us.
But, I was happy buying the new versions of office year after year until these most recent changes. Excel 2005 was one of their best versions. That was my subscription model: I pay full price every couple years you put out a new version and, in return, you give me a good, solid product that built off the prior one (or at least stayed damn near as useful) while providing support to that product through updates and bug fixes.
Subscription services are already gaining groans from people and we don't need another subscription in our lives.
But, to wrap up, back to the point: even though excel (and the other MS Office software) were incredibly versatile already, you still had the option to install the Analysis ToolPak if you needed to work with complex statistics or engineering analysis or even write your own plugins or macros for it, instead of those features overburdening the software and overwhelming the users by "covering all the use cases".
Re: Users hate change
#115My 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…
I completely agree and to me this is the "Flash Bones" problem.
Despite one's opinion of Flash as a web alternative or its license, it was a great way to run interactive content on a browser, and they kept adding features to their native IDE ("Flash" itself) and capabilities to the player (including the SWF spec).
It eventually reached a point where there was not much more to add to it: it could play video (novel at the time) and audio (including live synthesis), use sockets, etc etc, and do some pretty advanced stuff supported by the player/spec. But none of that sold Flash IDE licenses, so they _had_ to add more features to the IDE. One of these features was the ability to do Bones, a pretty common animation feature.
To me that's what marked the IDE decline. I used to create a lot of Flash content, but stopped using it at that point too. Not because of bones, but it was symbolic of the moment. I still created Flash apps for years, but it was always by creating fresh, "stage-less" projects, compiled from source code (the right way to go anyway).
Bones itself is a great feature, but at the time Flash the IDE was already way behind other animation tools that exported to Flash like ToonBoom. Adding that feature just made it clear that they didn't know what direction to go with the IDE: it wasn't the best animation tool (despite having kickstarted a market!), it wasn't the best dev tool, just a bit of both with very few people who needed both. No surprise it stopped selling even while the platform was thriving online, circa 2010.
Re: Users hate change
#116At Google years ago, the UX designers coined the term "change aversion" and used it in exactly this arrogant way that this article is talking about. They even used this concept to dismiss the empirical results of UX experiments that they themselves conducted with regular users, that indicated this effect. Lol how do I science?
This resulted in lots of internal memes mocking these UX designers.
Totally agree with everything this article says, fuck arrogant UX designers coming into my office and rearranging my workspace, fuck you coming into my house and rearranging my furniture.
(If you attempt to justify this by "it's not your product it's the company's", you are really missing the point, and you shouldn't be a UX designer. Human emotions don't care about legal structures.)
Re: Users hate change
#117My 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…
Microsoft Word 5.1 on the Macintosh was published in 1992 and was generally seen as the best word processor ever invented. It's UI was perfect. It won a lot of praise in the press, all of it deserved. Sadly, after version 5.1, Microsoft began to focus on the integration of the Office Suite, which meant re-doing all the apps so that they'd be open to programming. And more features got added, and the UI became cluttered. For those of us who sometimes use Word, but don't need the rest of Office, Word 5.1 remains the high point.
Also, as others often said, 5.0 seemed like a broken release, and the ".1" was a much bigger upgrade than is normally implied by a non-major-version number. So it is version 5.1, and not version 5.0, that is remembered fondly.
Re: Users hate change
#118> The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off that I'll move, no matter what the cost.
This is why I gave up my iPhone X. I just hated constantly re-learning Apple's new paradigm du-jour, and I absolutely loathed FaceID and the notch.
Now I have a OnePlus 7 Pro, with "Touch ID" and no notch, and except for some friends occasionally saying "why are you not blue" I am happy as a clam. I never want a "Face ID" and I never want a "notch." (I don't care about bezels, etc.)
Now, I'm considering dropping the rest of Apple from my life, after a 15 year Apple-only lifestyle. It's really the "touch bar," when all I really want is an ESC key and real F keys, and the fact that I have to repair my laptop every six months because some key or other is broken again. And, it's not even a "wait 20 minutes while we replace the keyboard" but more of a "wait a few days to a week" and god hope they don't charge you $700. Ridiculous.
Re: Users hate change
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
On the other hand, I’m totally against subscription software because I resent having to pay again and again for the same product just to be able to use it a month later. What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works? Why does everything have to be a recurring revenue stream? Because you have software engineers who need something to do? I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else!
Re: Users hate change
#120My 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…
Microsoft Word 5.1 on the Macintosh was published in 1992 and was generally seen as the best word processor ever invented. It's UI was perfect. It won a lot of praise in the press, all of it deserved. Sadly, after version 5.1, Microsoft began to focus on the integration of the Office Suite, which meant re-doing all the apps so that they'd be open to programming. And more features got added, and the UI became cluttere…
Office has gotten worse for me since 97, they added more and more crap that I didn't need and then put it front and center with a "look at the crap we added you don't need" design.
These days I write in markdown and it it has to be pretty format it in libre office (mdpdf works fine for 99% of my uses though).