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UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

debugandrelease.blogspot.com

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Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#11

Post by jdbernard »

robertlagrant wrote: post #10
chownie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much that, yep. There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube. There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.

What ideology is driving this?

I assume OP didn't mean that a single overarching ideology was driving all if these changes, but rather that each of them individually is ideologically driven (and therefore immune to questioning). They all seem to be directly counter to the end-user's desires but are off-limits to redesign.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#12

Post by toastercat »

rerdavies wrote: post #5

People like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.

It's the other way around for me. The product that goes through more redesigns (and inevitably hides or drops features as a result) seems shakier.

In comparison, I'm still using foobar2000 and Craigslist 20 years later.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#13

Post by Pulcinella »

wasteduniverse wrote: post #4

Can anyone here explain why YouTube (namely the mobile interface) goes through a total redesign every 1-2 years? Is it just to earn some unknown manager another promotion? I'm getting really sick of it at this point.

It's similar to the "shipping your org chart" problem. Constant redesigns means you are shipping your employee performance review and incentive structure.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#15

Post by spcebar »

toastercat wrote: post #12
rerdavies wrote: post #5

People like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.

It's the other way around for me. The product that goes through more redesigns (and inevitably hides or drops features as a result) seems shakier. In comparison, I'm still using foobar2000 and Craigslist 20 years later.

It depends on the product. If it's a site that you're directly making payments on, customers usually want to see something something that looks modern and recently updated. I don't have the wording for the survey question, but the result boiled down to old looking sites/creaky clunky sites are seen as less trustworthy to ecommerce buyers, at least the ones one of my former clients surveyed.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#16

Post by crote »

rerdavies wrote: post #5

People like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.

On the other hand, nothing says "I can be trusted" like a UI which gets overhauled for no good reason and suddenly becomes way worse because they ripped out essential features in the process.

I don't care about a splash of CSS to make it look fresh - just leave the rest of the UI alone, please.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#17

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

robertlagrant wrote: post #10
chownie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much that, yep. There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube. There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.

What ideology is driving this?

This is just what happens when groups of people work together.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#18

Post by JohnFen »

cainxinth wrote: post #14

This is a mostly fair and accurate take, but there is an element of cherry picking here. There are countless UI updates that you don’t notice or barely notice. When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.

> When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.

All UI changes bring some amount of pain to existing users. People will accept that pain if the benefit of the change is greater than the cost, no matter how large or small the change is.

The thing that's become common is for UI changes to happen that bring little, if any, benefit to the user.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time (2019)

#20

Post by nostrademons »

No, UI redesigns are a waste of time for the user.

They are very effective at getting the executives who sponsor them promoted, because they look great in a PowerPoint. The actual customer of an executive is the finance department, because they are the ones who actually control the headcount & budgets that an executive needs, and they are usually not the user. How the product works is often invisible to someone who is not a daily user, and financial analysts often don't have time to be power users in all the products they are evaluating. How it looks is very visible. Therefore, when deciding which projects to fund, they are often biased toward shiny.

Notice that founder-run companies, and ones that are too small to have normal corporate functional separation, usually don't invest in visual redesigns unless the existing UI is really bad. Big corporations do it continuously.

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