201–210 of 315 posts
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Word for Dos 5.0. If you are old like me, you may remember thinking this was a pretty good word processor, and when Word 6.0 came out, it seemed a bloated mess in comparison. It's been downhill ever since. Mac OS X 10.6.8. It was good, and stable, and nothing that has come after has really added value to the product.
Funny because Word 6 is often praised as perfect balance. Or maybe I read wrong
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How would you sell bug fixes? "Hi grincho, how would you like an update for X feature where we fix Y bugs for Z dollars?" Most people would respond by asking why they have to pay more money for things that should be working in the first place. It'll become hard to know whether a developer is fixing new bugs or whether they just wrote some buggy software knowing they'll get more money by selling bug fixes separately r…
Right. I should not have to pay again, or subscribe to some “service” to have the company fix their product’s defects. If I buy a vacuum cleaner that randomly rips up my carpet once every 100 sessions, or a garage door that opens by itself in the middle of the night, I should not have to pay the companies to fix them. This is why we have warranties and product recalls, which are conspicuously absent in the software b…
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"everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops." That's... how it should work. You don't get to hook into their wallets for time and all eternity. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. ... and then you go do something else! That is the prec…
The light bulb example is ironic, because the life of light bulbs was artificially shortened to ensure people had to keep buying them regularly.
Two related stories. At one point way back in the day, eBay wanted to change the background color of the main page from yellow to white. They didn't just make the change one day, instead they slowly changed the hex code every couple of days so the change was gradual. When it was complete, some people would say stuff like, "Hey, didn't the background used to be yellow, when did that change?". When I worked at reddit I…
This is just curmudgeonliness backed by nothing at all. You probably shouldn't do major redesigns with no real benefit to the user (I'm looking at you, reddit), but if you're adding or improving functionality, then feel free to incrementally improve your site constantly. People will get used to constant small improvements and will miss them if they stop. Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces…
How does this square with the overwhelmingly negative early responses to facebook's news feed, or reactions? Would you characterize them as "arbitrary"? I use those as examples because they now seem widely loved, so they seem like good (non-arbitrary) design to me, but they were poorly received.
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"everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops." That's... how it should work. You don't get to hook into their wallets for time and all eternity. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. ... and then you go do something else! That is the prec…
Except that revenue stream ends before the "fix bugs and improve performance" step. People buy based on screenshots/demos/trials/reviews, and those don't expose the deep bugs you run into 3 months later when doing real work. Shovels break, light bulbs burn out. Then you go buy another one, and there's a good chance it's better than the earlier one. The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality, and people kee…
Problem being, makers are now prohibiting you from owning your . From fixing your . From changing your so you don't need to buy . Now with forced updates, you're now literally prohibited from keeping the shovel you have and like!
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> 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…
The point was IF users hate it, you probably did something wrong in the redesign. That doesn't exclude the possibility of doing a redesign that users are excited about.
Plenty of IM clients I use update semi-regularly with new features, and I'm either neutral or excited based on whether I plan to use that feature, but I'm never upset because they're not breaking my existing workflow.
And, yes, sometimes a redesign just takes time to come around to, but there's also lots of redesigns that genuinely reduce functionality. I've lost track of how many times an update has outright removed a favorite feature of mine, reduced configuration options, and so on. This might be a sensible business decision, but it's not to my benefit.
I've seen many UI rollouts that carefully track user happiness metrics. All UI changes have in common that user happiness goes down for a short time after the change -- but for good changes, it goes back up and to an even higher level than before. So it's expected that right after a change people are unhappy, which is where Nielsen's (sensible) suggestion comes from. The problem is of course that UX designers get so…
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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.
"everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops." That's... how it should work. You don't get to hook into their wallets for time and all eternity. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. everybody who wanted your bought it and then the revenue stops. ... and then you go do something else! That is the prec…
Example: A customer bought your app on iOS 9. It worked perfectly fine. You wrote it once, because you couldn’t expect more revenue from existing customers. It stopped working on iOS 11, because 32-bit support was ended on Apple’s side.
Of course, it’s not Apple who gets the blame, it’s you, because your app doesn’t work anymore. But it is supposed to work, because your customer paid good money for it ($4.99).
Back in the day, sure, if you bought a software that worked on MS-DOS only, it’s your fault when you got Windows and it didn’t run your software. No expectations, no hard feelings. But iOS is iOS. It’s the thing running average Joe’s smartphones. Software bought for iOS should work on iOS. Forever.
Your examples all describe products with an expected expiration date. Software used to have expiration dates. But not anymore. The expectation changed.