Kept waiting to see where the data would come in and it never did. This is entirely data-free conjecture. This is the engineering equivalent of an article calling out a particular medicine as being ineffective purely on the basis of "I feel like it doesn't do anything so people should stop taking it".
UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
221–230 of 290 posts
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#222> 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. Try to understand and respect the work outside your own department and specialty. Building respect across those boundaries is a rare and valuable thing.
I wouldn't frame it this way, but there are many confounding things in measuring a change in the UI design.
I jumped from web consumer to operations, and the mindset is so different: in web, you have shallow actions that you want things to be easier and look aesthetically pleasing. In operations you want deep actions that require reliability or learning, and that require every or many users to do it, changing the UI is a nightmare for them. It has to be vastly better to compensate the change. And not only that, you need your operations to be more efficient than your competition: a bad ui can cause issues in an entire company.
In consumer-web, pages like reddit changes their entire UI to have posts read in the same page and its use-it or lose-it. Consumer web cruises along the monopolistic positions they have to spend resources without visible consequence. Who cares if reddit's ui is 10% snazzier or 10% snappier? It's not like the reddit user will stop using it because of it. That redesign happened in a company that raised half a billion dollars.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everything is on the ribbon. Once you understand that, it actually becomes a lot easier to use.
If you think menu's promote discovery better, you haven't looked at the Visual Studio menus in a while.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Every option that was on the menu is in the ribbon, there is no dark place. In fact, the ribbon probably surfaces even more options.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#225Entirely 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 (redd…
This is a good point to make. I think the author has just had bad experiences with designers, as have I. Gmail, venmo, etc. don't need a redesign because they were thoughtfully designed through a good process in the first place. To speak to your AWS example; right now I'm in the process of redesigning an incredibly complex product from the ground up because is was so poorly designed the first time around. The users c…
> Gmail, venmo, etc. don't need a redesign because they were thoughtfully designed through a good process in the first place.
Eh. Gmail is redesigned from time to time.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#226Predictably, the title alone is crack to HNers. If only stakeholders and designers would ask our opinion first, we'd save them the trouble! Between the author patting himself on the back for coming up with "don't do things for no reason" and "don't make things worse," he provides this criteria: > The only time a UI should be updated is if it impacts the ability of a user to actually use your application. This criteri…
Congratulations on writing the only reasonable comment in this dumpster-fire of a thread
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have used a quite a lot of online retail sites, and for me, the thing that most distinguishes the good from the bad is the quality of their search features, in giving me the tools to focus on relevant results. The most visible feature of many of the sites I visit are the attempts to get me to do something other than what I went to the site for.
I'd like to point out that the search and how the results are displayed are part of the design - and can be the major bit . UI design isn't only, often not even primarily, about aesthetics.
Bad UI design might cripple a good search capability, but UI design cannot fix a weak one.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have used a quite a lot of online retail sites, and for me, the thing that most distinguishes the good from the bad is the quality of their search features, in giving me the tools to focus on relevant results. The most visible feature of many of the sites I visit are the attempts to get me to do something other than what I went to the site for.
I'd like to point out that the search and how the results are displayed are part of the design - and can be the major bit . UI design isn't only, often not even primarily, about aesthetics.
UI redesigns frequently are primarily about aesthetics. You don't have to completely redesign your site to redesign your search.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#229The entire article can be summarized in one line.
> The only time a UI should be updated is if it impacts the ability of a user to actually use your application.
Amen. Words that could never be more true.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In reality, your conjecture turns out to be largely untrue. Visual design quality does have an impact. Did you read the article? The author specifically says, "Before all of the UI designers that read this go out and riot and champion against me for saying UI redesigns are a waste of time, let me say that I do value design . I think at the bare minimum, a product or website needs to be usable, and if you possess a…
> Did you read the article? Please don’t do this. > Maybe you should try to understand Or this. Reminder: be civil, don’t be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Come on, literally the second paragraph of the article addresses exactly the OP's point. I also wasn't being snarky, I was applying the OP's exact argument to his own critique of the article. I'm fine with sensible moderation, but holding up a mirror on a bad comment isn't an uncivil or snarky reply.