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UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

debugandrelease.blogspot.com

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Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#101

Post by hombre_fatal »

Predictably, the title alone is crack to HNers. If only stakeholders and designers would ask our opinion first, we'd save them the trouble!

Between the author patting himself on the back for coming up with "don't do things for no reason" and "don't make things worse," he provides this criteria:

> The only time a UI should be updated is if it impacts the ability of a user to actually use your application.

This criteria can be rewritten "only change to make improvements," but this is an eternal challenge with anything.

The previous UI wasn't handed down by god. It, too, was designed, and the only thing it has going for it compared to the global optimum is that it at least exists. And like any other system, it was built under different requirements with different unknowns. It accumulates debt and falls into the same traps of any other rewrite. Most importantly, it has to interface with actual humans.

I can sympathize with their rant over grating redesigns, but it's too easy to lambast things that go wrong and then plant your flag of "Yep, don't do this. You're welcome." It contributes to the toxic cynicism rife in our field.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#103

Post by aclissold »

deepstream wrote: post #94
calinet6 wrote: post #13

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you wan…

Funny thing about AUE is that it hides usability issues. People get dazzled by the look, and feel it's better than it is. This means the OP is correct. New paint doesn't make it more useful. To really help users, optimize for usable design, not just aesthetics.

Why not both?

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#104

Post by Quequau »

Something that I've been thinking about, perhaps because I'm a long time Reddit user, is how often when it comes to redesigns the motivations of those people funding and making the decisions do not actually have the interests of the existing users as their focus.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#105

Post by groestl »

camhart wrote: post #59
calinet6 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll concede "most people are of average idiocy" and cite core principles of statistics and the meanings of average and most. But yes, you're right, happens all the time. Less so with most of the large scale more popular redesigns people tend to think of when writing articles like this about tools they actually use; the team at Atlassian, for example, is not made of idiots, neither at Slack, Google, Twitter, or other…

I and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as smal…

An idiot, in the original sense of the word, is someone who focuses on themselves, showing no interest in the common cause/politics. It's a bit heavy, but reapplied here it could mean someone who focuses completely on visual quality, while not putting their time into other important aspects of the product (almost all of which are more important that visual quality, at least according to OP).

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#107

Post by atoav »

groestl wrote: post #105
camhart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as smal…

An idiot, in the original sense of the word, is someone who focuses on themselves, showing no interest in the common cause/politics. It's a bit heavy, but reapplied here it could mean someone who focuses completely on visual quality, while not putting their time into other important aspects of the product (almost all of which are more important that visual quality, at least according to OP).

This is how I would describe the noun of idiotic design if it existed.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#108

Post by atoav »

d0100 wrote: post #95
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redesigns tend to happen because someone in management decides they want to remake the UI in a way that appeals to them, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else. The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. Flat design was in a similar league, but not quite as bad. Is that a button or a text element? How can anyone tell? Refinement is a mu…

I am guessing that only Office power users hated the MS ribbon. I loved it, it's do much easier to find stuff if you already don't know where it is. Great design for the casual Wordster.

yeah but it is software: ehy not serve both?

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#109

Post by buboard »

I don't know about the designers, they are surely a big waste of my time as a user. Google is particularly guilty of this (or i just use their products more). Every new UI feels slower, and i m particularly aggravated by the sloppily animated "cards" and esp. the progress bars that are not even progressing, they re just looping. Adsense is much much worse than it used to be, buttons are not even responsive (because wait, animations haven't finished yet). I don't know why everybody is doing it, but it seems like a casualty of an echo chamber .

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#110

Post by Mtinie »

pdonis wrote: post #50
calinet6 wrote: post #13

> To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 years now Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a user experience designer, and I've been doing web software development and design for over 20 years. In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Main principle you wan…

> Visual design quality does have an impact. A negative one, based on what you quote: "This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing." Which seems to be saying that the uglier you make your UI, the better your chances of having actual usability issues surface.

This is the reason design isn’t a simple concept. The non-aesthetic portions of the effort (contextual and ethnographic research, information architecture, general usability, workflows, requirement generation, etc.) need to be done just so those warts can be exposed.

After the fundamentals are solid it’s then important to apply appropriate aesthetic and interactive elements to polish the experience.

Simply jumping to visual design after skipping the fundamentals is nearly assuring a failure. It would be akin to worrying about performance and scaling of product’s database and API without first considering if the data schemas and underlying technology stack even meet the operational needs.

Addendum: “Evolutionary design” instead of “revolutionary design” is typically preferred if one would like to keep a connection between how something was done before and the (hopefully) improved version.

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