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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

#161

Post by calinet6 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #157
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…

The fundamental challenge I have with UX and UX people is that there's clearly a lot of really important, useful stuff in the discipline, mixed with a lot of nonsense. And I've been burned a few times by those who tell a good story to susceptible executives and utterly waste time and resources to justify their own existence. I wish there were better resources for non UX people like me to learn how to tell the differe…

I do, too. It’s a growing field, and it’s much more muddy than dev. Give us time.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#162

Post by calinet6 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #144
speedplane wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're contradicting yourself here. If someone with authority is convinced that something is a good idea, then they have a reason for doing it. It might be a misguided reason, but it's not just randomness.

Distinguishing between badly chosen ideas and randomly chosen ones may be impossible if the authority figure provides no context.

I think you’ve identified one of the root causes here. :)

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#163

Post by Scarblac »

hopler wrote: post #155
blunte wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost. It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!" So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interacti…

Explain why the hamburger menu is bad but the floppy disk icon is good.

The floppy disk icon does one thing: "Save". Everybody knows it does, because that's been its job for ages now. What it looks like is irrelevant.

The hamburger menu _replaced_ the style of menu we used to have, where all the options were under their own menus with titles ("File", and so on). That was lost. The only reason they were left behind was to make it work well on tiny screens. If you don't have a tiny screen, you just lost functionality that you were familiar with and that worked, for no reason.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#164

Post by calinet6 »

blunte wrote: post #84
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…

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost. It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!" So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interacti…

A lot of that isn’t the redesign itself, but the fact that almost no one designs for the change event itself. It’s a whole different problem to solve, and it’s usually just dropping you into something totally different without context.

Could write a whole blog post on designing for UX change. I think I’ll do that...

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#165

Post by hopler »

speedplane wrote: post #91
mrighele wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing. On the other side, it will be less usable while i have to relearn how to use it. This is not an issue if it happens from time to time, you pay upfront a decrease of productivity and will be rewarded greatly later on. But in the era of SaaS we are constantly subject to a stream of redesigns, sometimes small, other times global.…

I don't mind functional UI updates (e.g., adding a search bar, when previously you had to scroll). But design changes are made simply for design purposes by big-tech companies are frustrating because when they do an update, it puts pressure on everyone else to follow their design to avoid looking out of date. For example, just a few months ago, Google used square rectangles for the search bar, and advocated "cards" w…

Round rects are better. Apple established that 30 years ago. Sharp corners are a fad that Microsoft(!) started with Windows Phone/10 just to be different from Apple (their chronic problem of trying to compete by doing randomly different things) and the Googlee going for it with cards, before they realized rounded rects are preferred for a reason. (And cards, what an innovation, copying the original desktop application GUI language from cascading/tiling window systems and HyperCard

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#166

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#167

Post by [deleted] »

hopler wrote: post #155
blunte wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost. It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!" So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interacti…

Explain why the hamburger menu is bad but the floppy disk icon is good.

[deleted]

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#169

Post by Waterluvian »

azhenley wrote: post #160
Waterluvian wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental challenge I have with UX and UX people is that there's clearly a lot of really important, useful stuff in the discipline, mixed with a lot of nonsense. And I've been burned a few times by those who tell a good story to susceptible executives and utterly waste time and resources to justify their own existence. I wish there were better resources for non UX people like me to learn how to tell the differe…

What you describe is true in any area, including software developers. You could just start learning about UX. It’ll make you a better engineer!

I think you're partly right that it is true in any area. But I don't think it's equally true in every area, and I think that UX lends itself a bit more to subjective artsyness than software development.

But I generally agree with your sentiment; you can absolutely find "just trust me" in software development. You can also probably smell it out better by learning about it more.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#170

Post by azhenley »

Waterluvian wrote: post #169
azhenley wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is true in any area, including software developers. You could just start learning about UX. It’ll make you a better engineer!

I think you're partly right that it is true in any area. But I don't think it's equally true in every area, and I think that UX lends itself a bit more to subjective artsyness than software development. But I generally agree with your sentiment; you can absolutely find "just trust me" in software development. You can also probably smell it out better by learning about it more.

If you do want to stay away from the “artsy” side, search for “usability engineering” and “interaction design”.

You’ll find a lot more about empirically driven methods to evaluate your UI, mostly from a productivity perspective. I personally find it fascinating!

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