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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

#21

Post by TylerE »

mnm1 wrote: post #6

Couldn't agree more. Jira, bitbucket, outlook, gmail and the list goes on and on. The really jarring redesigns are literally maddening and make me angry. They are so shitty. The other designs are basically the same design with more whitespace. Either way, the app doesn't benefit and at best, you're angering users. If I could stop using jira or Bitbucket, I would just for their shitty UIs. Things that used to be one c…

Most of the brain damage these days is JS, not CSS. Substantially harder to work around.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#22

Post by taeric »

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…

Oddly, to me, Apple Maps and Google Maps are basically the same, just on different devices. Neither is enough to make me want to purchase the device they are on, but both are indispensable on the device.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#23

Post by sexy_seedbox »

preommr wrote: post #18

What some people will think: "Improving your UI is a waste of time" "UI is pointless" What the author is actually saying (imo): "UI redesigns create costs that should warrant them. There are a lot of times when a website makes radical redesigns for comparatively marginal improvements. These improvements are not always worth it for reasons like existing userbase having to relearn the new ui." This is a fair point and…

This is how I felt when Meetup.com completely redesigned their site and logo.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#24

Post by austincheney »

I think the article misses the point that many design modifications are micro-optimizations. The entire goal is that the user doesn't notice (cognitively) but is modified in their behavior none the less. These sorts of micro-optimizations frequently made Travelocity hundreds of thousands of dollars when I was their A/B test developer. Adding a phone number to one page added an estimated $3 million in revenue.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#25

Post by underwater »

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…

Technical rewrites break functionality all the time. Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing is famous because Microsoft are one of the few companies who devote significant effort to backwards compatibility of APIs. Keeping things the same has a huge opportunity cost.

The reason people don't compliment a redesign of a user experience because the upsides are not immediately obvious. They benefits might be subconscious or change the product in a way that an existing user will take time to understand. The Facebook feed was a classic example of this. At the time Facebook was a directory of profiles and the feed introduced something users weren't explicitly asking for (aggregation of updates from friends). It was was seen as a regression, but it was built off a deep understanding of how the people were engaging with the product. You can hate Facebook for what they've become, but from a business and product perspective that change was enormously successful.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#26

Post by calinet6 »

inertiatic wrote: post #19
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…

>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 large companies with mostly significant design experience.

Smaller operations where we all likely work—yep, hit or miss.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#27

Post by debaserab2 »

austincheney wrote: post #24

I think the article misses the point that many design modifications are micro-optimizations. The entire goal is that the user doesn't notice (cognitively) but is modified in their behavior none the less. These sorts of micro-optimizations frequently made Travelocity hundreds of thousands of dollars when I was their A/B test developer. Adding a phone number to one page added an estimated $3 million in revenue.

I don’t think that really qualifies as a redesign on the scale the article describes. It sounds like the author is describing a total UI overhaul, not simply modifying one element on one page of the design.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#28

Post by sonnyblarney »

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…

"users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing."

Of course, in the first 10 seconds or few minutes, but I suspect strongly this effect fades over time.

Most UI redesigns are bad because they focus on the wrong things and throw out a lot of good things, or change for the sake of change.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#30

Post by atoav »

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…

Many creative professionals (that includes programmers) will go and do the thing they like instead of doing the thing that is needed. For architects that could be a ron of glass and open spaces while the people who use this space would rather have a space with lots of cosy private corners and spots, for programmers it is insisting on certain frameworks, languages or patterns despite hurting the project. For sounddesigners it is usign to most ober the top emotional sonic sledgehammer they find. For designers it can be worshipping the latest style, wrongly understood minimalism etc.

All of these things usually mean the person at hand might be able to produce something, but they are essentially the wrong person for the wrong job.

And let’s face it: these kind of redesigns are often something the new CEO wants to sbow to everybody how much change he embodies. The designer is underpaid and unfamilsr with the product, the project not well organized and the deadline soon.

Any designer worth their money should be able to redesign a UI while improving it. Understanding the value of what is already there and how it maps to user tasks, daily routines and understanding the relevant assumptions, is the main part of the job.

So whst you describe is not good design it is bad design or design that never got the chance to be good.

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