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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

#171

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

> more to subjective artsyness than software development.

You would think so, but the amount of 'developer superstition' and and 'gut feeling' I've faced in development is quite high.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#172

Post by vbezhenar »

hawaiianbrah wrote: post #135
icelancer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The MS ribbon was a classic redesign. It broke the standard menu metaphor and crashed productivity for no good reason. I thought I'd eventually get used to it. Nope. It's still significantly less productive than a standard menu.

Why’s that? Aren’t there shortcuts for about everything?

I have office installed, but I'm not using it often, so I have no idea about its shortcuts and I'm not going to learn them. Menu allows discovery. If you're smart enough, usually you can find your way to required feature via discovery. Ribbons have less items than menu and they are not very well organized (there's only one level of hierarchy), so I'm often stuck not able to find something.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#173

Post by vbezhenar »

hopler wrote: post #156
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…

Ribbon may have been a bad idea, but MS claimed they did a bunch of UX research around it. Why is the standard menu metaphor better? Hunting through a hundred menu items whose names I don't need is a pain, especially if I don't have years of experience learning the options.

But ribbon does not present those hundred items in a better way. It just presents most used items and rest are gone to some dark place. And those most used items already were present on toolbars.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#174

Post by hopler »

jslabovitz wrote: post #20
taeric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... I get what you are saying, but you are going to have to offer an alternative. Preferrably one that isn't complete garbage. What do you use over Google Maps and Facebook? For Maps, I really don't know of any alternative. And I now make some mapbox-gl applications for the office. There just doesn't seem to be any real alternative. For Facebook? I can actually almost completely unplug. That said, it is the eas…

I have an iPhone, so Apple Maps is right there as an alternative (and better, since it's more integrated into things like the Contacts app and auto-recognized addresses). I find its design to be much calmer and smoother, which makes me happier. And it doesn't keep asking me to login to the Googleverse... There are many reasons I don't use Facebook, most of which are enumerated in countless HN posts, but a big reason…

With all respect, people over age 50 are not the target demographic for general purpose mass market products. Even simple things like supporting large fonts or color contrast for weaker eyes is beyond the capability of tech giants (in large part because of the tyranny of pixel perfect UI designers over simple auto-flow/layout algorithms

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#175

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing.

Of course perception and reality are different things. And I imagine that effect is only really true for, at best, some slight statistical majority. Certainly I know a lot of people who've stuck with older versions of software because it looks and works like they've come to expect, and I myself tend to judge the usability of new software by how much it looks like a Win95 application.

The thing I love most about only developing software for in-house use (because my company doesn't sell software) is that nobody really cares what it looks like.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#176

Post by Pulcinella »

jslabovitz wrote: post #8

> You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go to get good tacos. You don't use Facebook because the UI is nice, you use it to talk to your friends and share photos. I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscr…

I agree with you about Facebook’s garbage interface, but Google Maps could be so, so much worse. At least you can just type an address all on one line.

If you want to see real garbage map apps, look to car navigation. My Mazda 3 requires around 20+ taps (plus typing) to get navigation to an address. The city, street name, and house number are all separate input fields. You have to confirm each one, then confirm the whole address, then confirm what it thinks the address is, then pick the route, then confirm the route, and then finally start the route.

Total nightmare, and that’s if you actually know the address. Address lookup is a whole different problem.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#177

Post by alexandercrohde »

Entirely on-point.

When I think of the major apps I use today that I do like and ask What new UI do they need, the answer is none (gmail, hn, venmo). In fact, some UIs would do well to hide the noise and look more like HN than Yahoo (e.g. github)

When I think of the major apps I use today but dislike, the reason is usually performance, not pretty icons (slack, uber). Sometimes the redesign itself is an obstacle (reddit).

When I think of apps that COULD be redesigned (e.g. AWS) I'd want it to happen once, be engineer-focused, and entirely about logical layout rather than graphics.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#179

Post by Theodores »

werber wrote: post #147
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…

UI !== UX, without the research side it is kinda pointless. I'm not sure if the point of the article was to say that but it's what I read

Thank goodness someone has chimed in with this. The original article has no mention of UX.

UI developers are getting marched out the door at a well known publisher right now, their services no longer needed. UX is a different story with this mystery publisher, they now get to call a lot of the shots.

There is a bigger discussion to be had regarding the whole visual design process. In 2006 when you could have your navigation in any corner of the screen with any design for the search icon it made sense to have UI designers add their special flourishes. Now we know where the navigation goes and what the icon is for search, that has all been settled. User experience still needs some people to take care of it as we can't leave that up to the programmers, can we?

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