Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Users hate change

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 315 posts

Re: Users hate change

#121

Post by holy_city »

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.

I wholeheartedly agree, but it's still not perfect. Introducing new revenue models into old industries where people are used to "owning" their software can be dicey.

A decent middle ground is permanent fallback versions. But then you still have the issues with feature creep.

Re: Users hate change

#122

Post by noir_lord »

collyw wrote: post #44
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…

Thank god Linux gives you multiple desktop options. I am happily using "Windows 98 style" XFCE. To be fair there probably hundreds of subtle improvements over Windows 98, but no horrendous game changers like when Ubuntu went from Gnome to Unity.

Cinnamon feels like XFCE's conceptual descendant, it doesnt break the desktop metaphor at all from win98/XFCE while having enough of the newer stuff if you want it.

It was what I used until recently and would go back to in a heartbeat.

Re: Users hate change

#123

Post by jeremyjh »

enraged_camel wrote: post #85
yoz-y wrote: post #70

Earlier 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.

I think you are forgetting tech support. Depending on the product and the types of users you have, it can be time-consuming and quite expensive for the company. The primary reason subscription model makes sense, and why many software shops are switching to it, is because you never want to find yourself in a situation where you have to generate new sales to afford supporting the existing customer-base.

This was never an issue because in the old model you only provide support for one year, and sell an annual maintenance plan at 20% of original price to continue it.

Re: Users hate change

#124

Post by rurp »

wycy wrote: post #91
zzzcpan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless of how much better it is. No, the simple truth is it's not better if users hate it. It means it failed to account for existing users and their use cases.

With that rationale you literally can't change anything ever. Version 1.0 ever after. It is better if it ultimately just takes time for them to like it. The same people who initially hated it will most likely grow to like it. When we migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last year, my boss was extremely upset--but he was just as upset a decade ago having to upgrade to Windows 7 in the first place. Users come around e…

God I hate this kind of paternalistic reasoning from developers. Nobody is saying that you can never update software ever, just that those updates should be driven by a clear functional reason. Implementing a change that you know your users will hate just to switch to a "modern" UI does not serve users.

> Users come around eventually.

How do you know? A number of apps I use have overhauled their UI in a way that made it look shinier at a glance, but categorically worse for actually using. I either stopped using them if the change was too awful, or eventually just stopped leaving negative feedback once it was clear the devs didn't care. Never once have I hated an update at first and later thought to myself, "Wow I was so wrong, this update is actually amazing, I'm glad the dev team ignored all of that negative feedback and forced it on their existing users".

Re: Users hate change

#125

Post by holy_city »

ryandrake wrote: post #119
la_barba wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Honestly? Because no software is free from bugs and there will always be a need for support. The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support.

But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop.

That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.

Re: Users hate change

#126

Post by mgbmtl »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #62
redbeard0x0a wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best analogy of finished software I have heard is this: > Software is done, like mowing the lawn is done. We live in an imperfect world, if we want to keep ourselves safe and prevent bad actors out of our data/technology. Updates are a part of the process. You don't mow your lawn once, it has to be maintained. Which is the same as software. This is something that we would be all better for if we could teach this…

I do not buy this. You're equating security updates with UI changes. Pointless UI changes get a lot more frustrating as you get older. What we really need is software with really long support versions that minimize bullshit churn in UI and usability.

Old version support has a cost for the company supporting it. I guess it shows to the maturity of the company when they do. It's not easy to pull off.

As a dev on a mid-size project, I'd say that those UI changes often have two sides, with people who will also complain "why can't you just fix/change X, it's such a small change, but so annoying". Everyone wants their issue fixed, but not the issues of others.

Our project went from having two versions (stable and old-version), to just one, because the community of users had split into two, with much fewer developers working on fixing the latest version (because their company mostly supported users on the old version, not deploying new projects on the latest version, very understandably risk-averse people).

Removing the old-version made a few developers angry, but 80% of them rallied and now the project is much more sustainable (i.e. we're not big enough to afford the split). Eventually we introduced a paid version of the old-version supported for 6 months, with a stretch goal to extend to 12 months if people supported it. Only a handful are paying for it. Others are now happy on the latest, which became more robust as more people are using it.

Re: Users hate change

#127

Post by yxhuvud »

mikro2nd wrote: post #57
yboris wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter redesign (last week or so?) has been wonderful for me: it keeps your place in navigation, allowing you to look at a tweet thread and go back to the place you were before. Previously on Twitter, after any navigation you'd lose your place, having to scroll (and reload all the previously-seen content) very far if you were down far.

On the other hand, every time I have been back since the changeover, they reset my feed to 'algorithmically chosen tweets' (or whatever they call it) instead of the "by time posted" option I invariably want and choose. It's gotten so I'm pretty unlikely to go back to Twitter now, since along with this major annoyance, it's ugly, cluttered to the point of near unusable, and all-round annoying to me. So long and thanks…

The same issue exist in the Facebook feed, by the way. I really wonder why they won't allow people to be able to set it permanently.

Re: Users hate change

#128

Post by svnpenn »

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…

I think a big part of it is tards like Mark Otto:

https://github.com/mdo

that make changes without regard of how useful or disruptive they are:

https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830138373230653440

Re: Users hate change

#129

Post by enraged_camel »

jeremyjh wrote: post #123
enraged_camel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are forgetting tech support. Depending on the product and the types of users you have, it can be time-consuming and quite expensive for the company. The primary reason subscription model makes sense, and why many software shops are switching to it, is because you never want to find yourself in a situation where you have to generate new sales to afford supporting the existing customer-base.

This was never an issue because in the old model you only provide support for one year, and sell an annual maintenance plan at 20% of original price to continue it.

People balked at that too, though. It was widely perceived as a "money milking" scheme.

Re: Users hate change

#130

Post by gmueckl »

zzzcpan wrote: post #80
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…

> regardless of how much better it is. No, the simple truth is it's not better if users hate it. It means it failed to account for existing users and their use cases.

No, this is not true at all. In fact, the very first software project I was paid for was a perfect example: I had to replace an ancient DOS based database app with something more modern. The end result had a GUI that was completely different, barely retained the same workflow, had tons of new input validation that users had to cope with all of a sudden. End result? They had a knee jerk hate for it when they saw it. They would have to re-learn routines they had settled into for about 10 years. So there was push-back.

And it didn't last: a few weeks after the transition everybody told me that they liked the new app so much more. Why? Because they couldn't make that many dumb mistakes anymore that were tedius to correct. The app kept track of more information behind the scenes that helped then woth processing the data and - that was the main reason IMO - I had carefully designed a ton of tiny nearly invisible helpers into the UI that helped a lot with data entry. There was stuff like autocompletion that had context sensitive suggestions, form fields would pre-fill with the most likely values where appropriate etc. It was fairly subtle. It took a while for the users to learn all that. But once they understood the new way of doing things, noone wanted to go back anymore.

Post reply on HN