UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

I think that's a deliberately uncharitable interpretation.

If you're admitting there are problems in the previous redesign (and you are), then why not fix those pieces rather than redesigning the colors, icons, and entire rest of the interface?

It's not so different from an engineer who rewrites a whole service because it has 3 bugs. Almost never worth.

> 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.

Cool, cool. To preface this comment, I'm a guy who owns a computer and uses software.

Most GUI redesigns I've seen in the past 10 years make the interface prettier, but LESS usable. The new design usually incoroporates three categories of changes:

1. Lists of items are rendered in a larger font with more spacing between items, leading to lower information density, thus requiring more scrolling. (For bonus points, often a window that has a scrollable area isn't resizable, so you're stuck with whatever arbitrary viewport size the designer decided was large enough.)

2. Controls that used to always be visible are now hidden until you hover or click the right spot. This is done to reduce "clutter", as though controls are somehow graffiti.

3. A bunch of convenient shortcuts enjoyed by long-time power users weren't reimplimented in the new design, because the designer didn't know about them, or simply didn't think they mattered.

I have a WordPress blog. WordPress recently overhauled their entire editing UI, and I hate it. When I started the blog several years ago, I was able to figure out how to use WordPress by exploring the UI. The new UI is an extreme example of #2; when you go to write a new post, the page is entirely blank. You have to click somewhere to get a text cursor, and there isn't even a visually delineated text area before you do so. There are a couple of features I had to hunt around for, and I wouldn't have even known those features existed if I hadn't learned them from the old UI, which presented them front and center.

My company uses JIRA for bug tracking. They switched to a new GUI a while back, and I hate it. It's harder to find things that used to be presented front and center. And as an example of #3: It used to be possible to just type an issue number like "392" in the search box, hit Enter, and be brought immediately to that issue page. Not anymore; if you do that quickly, you get a "no results found" page. If you type the number and then wait a couple of seconds, you get a list of search results, which you can then click on. Pressing Enter then takes you to the first one, but often that is NOT issue #392, it's just some issue that happens to have the text "392" somewhere in it. So you have to eyeball the search results, and then click the right one. The old way was more convenient. Fortunately, I eventually found the preference to switch back to the old GUI, which they helpfully give you because they apparently realize that the new GUI sucks. (I don't know offhand if it reverts the search behavior, because I've already changed my habits to not use it anymore.)

I think the 80/20 rule applies when it comes to mature products. 20% of redesign is useful and make products better. 80% are neutral at best, and breaking at worst.

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

https://www.alexkras.com/death-by-redesign/

There's so much this article misses: - most large companies a/b test their redesigns. If your company isn't big enough (for the tools or traffic needed to a/b test), then yeah, you're left to judgment calls. Really good a/b tests will actually capture things like "existing users initially hate it but eventually end up using the product more" - a lot of UI redesigns are driven by effect on new users, which might be more important to the company. Think about it, if you're already using the product, you probably don't care what it looks like too much (and might be annoyed if it changes). For new users, anesthetics leave a lasting first impression.

Yes, at many small companies without data, redesigns can be a waste of time and even harmful. But that doesn't mean they should always be avoided.

I'm not confusing anything. Whether people can complete tasks they need to perform is a major influence on how they feel about a design. And where they prefer an approach that makes the task harder rather than easier, that is still valuable information, and the appropriate response can easily be to give them the approach they prefer.

But I'm going to disagree that an hour is enough to reveal any advantages and disadvantages that may be present.