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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

#121

Post by raindropm »

calinet6 wrote: post #17
userbinator wrote: post #5

I've noticed that it's a commonly accepted fact in most other areas of software development that mass rewriting of large and extensively-used pieces of code is a bad idea precisely because it'll probably introduce plenty of new bugs that were either never a problem in the existing code, or was noticed and already fixed there in the past. Yet when it comes to UI, those introduced bugs --- breakages of users' existing…

Good designers will improve visual systems, usability, task efficiency, consistency, symbolism, brand perception, and more concrete things with a redesign. If they don't, they're artists, not UX designers. FWIW, most redesigns I see in the wild are doing most or some part of these very real improvements. That said, qualitative value is still value. Just because user feedback on the visual quality is vague doesn't mea…

Yep, not everything that counts can be counted. I see a lot of things got treated as unimportant just because it cannot be measured in number (or we don't know how, yet)

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#122

Post by ascar »

calinet6 wrote: post #26
inertiatic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.

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 have the feeling they force some UI and especially icon redesign with every new Android version. Not because it's necessarily or actually looks better, but just to make it different. It's mildly annoying to me. Especially since some app icons now have ugly white boarders (galaxy s9 with android 8 and even worse in 9/oneui).

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#123

Post by magicalhippo »

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…

> Main principle you want to look up: the Aesthetic Usability Effect. Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing.

Well that explains a few things. Many a time have I experienced a UI remake looking great but being absolutely horrible to use.

Take for example Google+, where they tried a last ditch effort to make it more popular by doing a UI update. They made it look really slick, but in the process made it much, much worse to actually use. I used to be an active G+ user (yeah, I know) but after they forced me to use the new UI I stopped using it, it was that bad.

Another example is Acronis TrueImage, which completely redid their UI, making it much more visually pleasing and up-to-date. Initially I thought it was great, but then I noticed that certain processes were a lot more tedious to do, and they'd also removed a lot of functionally in the process.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#125

Post by maxhallinan »

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…

How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect account for the success of websites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, classic Reddit, and LinkedIn, to name a few? There seems to be no correlation between aesthetic quality and use of these sites. I'm not sure what that indicates about the "usability" of these sites. If the goal is to maximize the number of users, it would seem that there is some evidence that a sense of usability determined by aesthetic quality is not that important.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#126

Post by Retra »

maxhallinan wrote: post #125
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…

How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect account for the success of websites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, classic Reddit, and LinkedIn, to name a few? There seems to be no correlation between aesthetic quality and use of these sites. I'm not sure what that indicates about the "usability" of these sites. If the goal is to maximize the number of users, it would seem that there is some evidence that a…

People aren't using those sites because of their UIs, but because of the content they offer. UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#127

Post by oftenwrong »

pembrook wrote: post #119
dsego wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job security, designers can only design, so that's what they do. And if there is nothing new to design, they will keep redesigning. Gotta keep up with the trends.

Coders can only code, so that's what they do. Even if there's no new features needed or the old software is working fine as is, they will keep refactoring. Gotta keep up with the trends.

I'd agree. Given the opportunity, programmers will often work without regard to business needs. For example, rewriting an old codebase using their favourite new stack.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#129

Post by birksherty »

speedplane wrote: post #83
kd5bjo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll agree that people never do anything without a reason, with the caveat that “It’s my boss’s pet project and he signs my paycheck” is often a good enough reason to do something.

If it's your boss's pet project, then your boss probably has a reason for doing it, even if it isn't a good one.

That reason is often promotion and putting things in the resume.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#130

Post by birksherty »

dsego wrote: post #111
inertiatic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.

Job security, designers can only design, so that's what they do. And if there is nothing new to design, they will keep redesigning. Gotta keep up with the trends.

That's what happens in most of website redesigns.
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