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Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

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Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#211

Post by nickbaum »

A few thoughts:

* Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies.

* You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.

* Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this.

* Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it.

* You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users.

* This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data.

At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#212

Post by darushimo »

joeyh wrote: post #172

You know, programs could version their UI's. I was struck in Bram Cohen's interview by how much care he's taken to avoid changing vim's behavior at all, while still letting nice new features be added. In the case of vim, you have to learn about features and enable them to change the UI. That works, but it does mean that the default vim experience for a new user lacks a lot of its cool features, and it can be hard to…

I just hung out with an old friend last week and while he's into his tech, he doesn't work in the industry. he expressed the same sentiment in the last line of your comment.

UI versioning sounds like a ridiculously difficult challenge, so difficult that it's worth thinking about more, because most people won't (because it's so hard). I'm gonna take that idea and run with it a bit...

A few things come to mind:

- Added complexity - apps would have two unique versions at the same time "Oh i'm running gmail 15.2 with UI v 12.0"

- I wonder if another ways of achieving something similar is keeping legacy UI by calling it a "theme." While, politically, it might be difficult to get funding for a "theme" over a "redesign," with such an important and widely used application like GMail, it makes total sense to me that there are 2-4 interaction schemas that people could use if they'd like. Maybe "theme" is too weak of a name,--maybe "Schema"? Something else?

- What sort of protocol would a "theme" use to improve? Let's say that "we want to keep the important parts of this theme as much as possible, not mess with them, just add this new feature." How universally possible is that, or do a majority of big new features inherently complicate a UI and the mental models of its users?

- Getting into the nitty gritty details, though, there would almost inherently be splintering--different themes would have microinteractions and microfeatures that others would not. While that's probably good for the end user wanting to differentiate between them, it would make the "Do we add big feature X?" conversation across all "Theme Teams" AND development even more difficult.

- Would the themes themselves have versions?

- In a way, themes are already available as versions. Ex: I am running an older version ("theme") of twitter on my ipad because i just haven't gotten around to updating it. but It still works. What would be great is if twitter could allow me to switch between this version and the newest one so I could see if the newest version worked better for me. I could switch back if it didn't. Right now, I can upgrade, but I can't switch back, so upgrading is "switching permanently and hoping for the best."

- what are your thoughts?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#213

Post by cjp »

keda wrote: post #111
mattmanser wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably mean schedule, and no it doesn't as it shows only 6 or so items per page and isn't good for glancing at. I can't glance at it and see I've a meeting in the morning, I've got to read it to see when the appointments are. There's a reason the old paper calendars work so well, cause you can just glance at them. The old calendar also had a week view where you could see most of the week and what was on. Now yo…

You can tap on the month to get a monthly view.

No you can't. Tapping on the month shows you the days in the month, not your calendar events for the month.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#214

Post by mirkules »

joeyh wrote: post #172

You know, programs could version their UI's. I was struck in Bram Cohen's interview by how much care he's taken to avoid changing vim's behavior at all, while still letting nice new features be added. In the case of vim, you have to learn about features and enable them to change the UI. That works, but it does mean that the default vim experience for a new user lacks a lot of its cool features, and it can be hard to…

> I'm sure that UI developers would hate this. Having to maintain old UI code, or implement pixel-perfect imitations of it using the new UI code. Needing to worry about how to shoehorn new features into an old UI that was not designed for them. Etc.

Programmers and coders would (and do) get blasted for being lazy if the user has to learn something that can be done automatically with code, no matter how difficult. But when a designer changes the UI, we excuse it as "cost of progress". It's about time that UI design is held to the same standard as functional design.

To be fair, we are seeing a natural progression of an entire industry. First make it work -> make it work well -> then make it pretty -> make it work well AND look pretty. This is pretty much the lifecycle of every other industry, and fortunately the tech industry is finally approaching maturity and starting to think about that last stage.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#216

Post by Bjartr »

userbinator wrote: post #117

That keyboard looks somewhat alright at first, and you can sort of see where the buttons are for the most part, but the comma and full stop really makes me uncertain about where the borders between the keys are, and that's not a good thing for a touch UI - it's uncertain enough for people with fat fingers. Is it too much to ask for to have some lines separating the keys? On the other hand, someone will certainly prop…

I thought mystery meat navigation described buttons that only non-conventional icons to indicate what they did until you hovered (if even then), thus their behavior was a mystery until you tried them.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#218

Post by exelius »

privong wrote: post #77
exelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data is easy for them to get since, you know, they control the OS behind your phone and will get the data anyway. The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literall…

Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.

Google was the entire inspiration for the meme.

Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising.

If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away.

[1] https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#219

Post by shanemhansen »

gdulli wrote: post #85

The problem is that software companies acquire the amount of labor (which is large) that they need to create something but then don't have anything to do with that extra labor when it's finished and all that's needed is maintenance and a reasonable amount of additional upgrade work. So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that'…

For better or worse, Tech. companies make software. Every member of the organization from product to design to engineering probably has some passion for innovating. If they didn't want to innovate they probably wouldn't be working on something like android.

Sadly these engines of innovation create sup-optimal products if the product is already at a local maximum for current constraints. They then just endlessly circle the local maximum in a repeating pattern (this is called fashion).

Luckily for these companies, power users and media also like change for change's sake. Helping them hype each new iteration of the product, driving sales, and giving validation (and job security) to the product/design/engineering organization.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#220

Post by 7007 »

Symmetry wrote: post #191
PuffinBlue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some more venting... Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events…

While we're on the topic: Clock - I used to be able to dismiss my 7:30 wakeup alarm if I woke up at 7:20 by simply swiping away the notification. But now I can't find any way to suppress the next instance of a recurring alarm.

I'm still on KitKat, but I think you can swipe down over the notification to open up a dismiss option underneath the notification.

(at least you can on kitkat, I swipe down over 3 alarms at once and dismiss them all)

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