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Users hate change

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Re: Users hate change

#241

Post by lonelappde »

grincho wrote: post #135
holy_city wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. F…

Then charge for bug fixes. Charge for updates that make the application run on a new version of the OS. If those things provide sufficient value, users will pay for them. I've been paying for that for decades for my commercial text editor. And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least fo…

You should never subscribe to a product that doesn't let you export your data. All the major products do.

Re: Users hate change

#243

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ken wrote: post #193
nofunsir wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality

Call me cynical, but I think it's naive to make this claim.

Manufacturers don't optimize quality, they optimize profits. Even if there's sufficient competition, manufacturers don't race upwards to improve quality, they race downwards to reduce the cost and undercut the competition.

You can see this in kitchen appliances. People complain about how they don't last as long as they used to and are harder to repair. That's because when a customer sees a $30 blender and a $50 blender on the shelf, they will nearly always pick the $30 blender, even if the $50 blender is a higher quality. There was a race to the bottom on pricing, and corners had to be cut.

Re: Users hate change

#244

Post by adventured »

ken wrote: post #196
dataflow wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support. Oh come on. Companies have been in business selling stuff for the longest time. It wasn't exactly wrecking capitalism before subscriptions became the normality in the last decade.

It's been wrecking software companies for decades. Name one consumer software company from the 1980's that still exists, besides Microsoft. In software, monopolies, consolidation, and integration are the name of the game. In contrast, I can easily name dozens of companies in other fields that have been around for 50 years or more, including some small ones that have stayed small yet successful.

> Name one consumer software company from the 1980's that still exists, besides Microsoft.

Adobe (1982), Intuit (1983), Electronic Arts (1982), Activision (1979), Symantec (1982), McAfee (1987)

Nintendo should probably be on that list with EA & Activision as well. The only reason they still exist is due to their consumer software business. They've shipped an enormous amount of consumer software.

Microsoft hasn't been a pure-play software company in a very long time. So I would also include Apple and IBM on that list, as both have shipped huge volumes of consumer software at various points (Apple is both still alive and still ships consumer software; IBM still exists, but no longer ships consumer software).

Re: Users hate change

#245

Post by cm2187 »

holy_city wrote: post #125
ryandrake wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. F…

I think software is one of the only industries where customers are charged for defects in the product.

Re: Users hate change

#246

Post by _pghu »

sizzle wrote: post #228

Wow this person is projecting their ignorance of the decades of academic HCI studies and industry best practices, including UX design and research methodologies for bringing the user into the design process (to understand their needs) and uncovering user insights from testing designs early on in the design process. Would love to see some concrete examples of redesigns that support the author's argument because I can…

I imagine you’re being downvoted because your post comes across as another smug designer/product person saying “I know better than you, you uneducated philistine”, with a side of “you just haven’t seen it done right and your personal experience is wrong.”

I’m sure Reddit’s abortion of a redesign has went through hundreds of rounds of UX testing and has been signed off on by the masters of the field, but it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy. It does everything worse than the existing design, except perhaps for increasing some sort of pointless dashboard metric users don’t care about.

Re: Users hate change

#247

Post by miguelmota »

empath75 wrote: post #8

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…

> backed by nothing at all

What lol I mean just look at the tweets for the terms 'twitter redesign'; there's plenty of evidence that people feel strongly about redesigns.

[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20redesign&src=typed_qu...

Re: Users hate change

#248

Post by phkahler »

lars_francke wrote: post #174
nofunsir wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I agree with your examples but I think a piece of software is different because users expect it to change over time. New Mac OS version? Users want to support it. Found a bug in a library uses? Users expect to get a fixed version etc. And while as a software user/buyer myself I like the idea of paying once and be done with it I kinda understand why people need recurring income if they keep on working on a piece of so…

>> New Mac OS version?

I have been avoiding the available OS update for my Macbook Air because I've heard it kills performance, reduces battery life, may not run one of my favorite applications, and AFAIK brings nothing that I actually want.

Re: Users hate change

#249

Post by Silhouette »

WA wrote: post #210
nofunsir wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

This is a bit naive. Software and especially apps these days are more a stream of updates (like Netflix) than a v1.0 you buy once. Updates are expected from users (and app stores). 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…

Software bought for iOS should work on iOS. Forever.

What you're glossing over here is that for literally decades, that was a pretty good baseline assumption, because we actually valued backward compatibility. The lengths that Microsoft went to in order to maintain that compatibility in the first several major releases of Windows are legendary. The lengths that Linux developers still go to are also remarkable.

It's only in the crazy new world of X-as-a-service and not even controlling the OS on your own devices that anyone thinks deliberately breaking stuff every few years to force the upgrade treadmill is a good thing. And the people who think that are largely the ones who also see you as nothing but a data point in a revenue maximisation model, not the actual users.

Ask yourself this: Have you ever met anyone who isn't a software developer who told you joyously about how much they appreciate the endless stream of updates that everything they buy now gets? I haven't. But I have lost track of how many friends and family have bemoaned things being changed that they didn't want, older devices that seemed to be working perfectly well but then got broken by some software update, some service they depend on being broken or switched off, some content on a service they pay for being removed or blocked unless they pay more, etc.

This is not progress. This is a failure of regulation, the triumph of capitalist free markets in consolidating so much power in so few places that competition is no longer an effective protector of the customer's best interests.

Re: Users hate change

#250

Post by Silhouette »

lonelappde wrote: post #238
WA wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit naive. Software and especially apps these days are more a stream of updates (like Netflix) than a v1.0 you buy once. Updates are expected from users (and app stores). 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…

What's wrong with charging for upgrades? I buy a computer with Mac 9 and some programs, and when I want Mac 10. I buy upgrades.

What's wrong with charging for upgrades?

I hear the big downside is that you have to offer enough improvement over the previous version for your customer to be willing to pay for them. That's just crazy talk!

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