If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)

There’s a flip side to this. If you change the UI for no reason, people get upset. For example, the latest iOS update flipped the speaker and mute buttons during a call. Why? No improvement was made, it’s just frustrating.

More like, if you ship useless apps, people learn to avoid.

Notepad2 is an amazing drop-in replacement with a perfect balance between features and simplicity. That’s what Notepad should have been since forever. Microsoft should buy it and study how to make basic apps.

Last time I’ve used notepad it still couldn’t tab things. When it’s so bad, there’s no chance I will “notice” anything later. You lost a user of a free mandatory default app, congrats.

I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. Even if you believe you have a functional reason, you had better think really long and hard about whether the supposed improvement you want is worth the pain of every single user needing to adapt to that change.

> if you dug into Vista, you'd find quite a few substantive technical improvements over the now-ancient Windows XP. But many of those improvements were under the hood, and thus invisible to the typical user.

The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.

I can tell you from personal experience on a UX team why it happens:

The UI is designed for features A, B, and C. We design, test, revise design, test, and so on. There’s more thought and rigor that goes into than you might be thinking.

Hurray, product launches, it looks good, and most importantly it works and users are successfully completing their tasks.

Now what? Well at the company town hall meeting the CEO announces features D, E, and F. Oh, there was a team already working on these features in isolation and the workflow is set in stone because they already built the back-end services and APIs. Ok, now we need to design UI for these features and cram them alongside A, B, and C.

If we were smart we designed the UI in such a way that it can accommodate new stuff, because we always know there’s new stuff coming down the line. It fits, but now the UI is getting a bit bloated.

Now here comes new features G, H, and I. Oh, by the way feature H is similar to E, but it works totally differently. They kind of fill the same role, so we need to make sure users aren’t confused by it. No, we can’t merge them because E is owned by product but H is the CMO’s initiative.

Cram more stuff in. Now it’s starting to get confusing, and the design that made sense for A, B, C, D, E, and F doesn’t really work with I because feature I does something that current user’s don’t really need, it’s meant to grow our market share.

Rinse and repeat until the only thing left to do is nuke it all from orbit and repeat the cycle.

In my experience it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional product culture, not overzealous UX designers. We’d rather not design new UIs for the same product constantly and do “refreshes”, we’d rather be fixing all the unglamorous problems in existing UI that frustrates users or get to the backlog of WCAG violations that no one seems to care about.