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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

#71

Post by tanilama »

I tend to agree. Google supposedly has an army of good designers, with their constant redesigns, my first thoughts are always that I wish the redesign never happens, but later because I stick to it, I get used to it so that I dislike it a little less until next redesign happens.

Let’s face it. People aren’t really that welcoming towards redesign, if given a choice, they probably would choose to have the business as usual. And aesthetics matters only to certain degree, and if it stands out it becomes distracting. I wish people consider that familiarity should be an important factor in considering whether to change UI or not, UI can be good if they choose to look unimpressive, for utilities it might be better that way.

And real world appliance really changes the design so dracstically as software, a micro-oven looks like a micro-oven, a Coca-Cola can looks like the same like forever. A car always has 4 wheels. Why on earth software just changes the information flow randomly just because they can? This doesn’t make sense.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#72

Post by Aegaeus10111 »

UI - or any other design is not primarily about aesthetics. Where the author says, "You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go", he's right, but it took good design to make you be able to use maps and to get value from the increasing amount and level of complexity of info therein.

That all said, I agree with him that many UI redesigns are pointless and expensive. Those tend to be the ones that don't bring new value to the user - just try to do the same old thing in a "modern" or (yikes - I hate this word) "fresh" way.

Good design of anything is hard, UI's are no exception. When you go beyond UI to uX, you enter the world of motivation, intent, expectations, and other emotional fuzziness. The design job gets harder by 10 or 100x. But it's there that you find the good reasons to consider a UI redesign.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#73

Post by Aegaeus10111 »

mannykannot wrote: post #41
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…

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.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#74

Post by yason »

Worst thing is coupling UI redesign with changing the set of features.

First, you lose a familiar interface and you don't know where to find even the existing features. Then you realise that the feature you're looking for is no longer there. Maybe it will be brought back online later or will be replaced by another, "better", feature later.

UI redesigns are sometimes just plain unavoidable but they should be done separately from other changes. Much like you want to commit the code reformatting change separate from functional changes so you know you're just changing whitespace basically and there's nothing that should break your codebase.

As a user I can only absorb a certain amount of change at a time: I can learn a new UI if I know I'll find the familiar pieces somewhere in there. And I can accept new features or old ones being changed to different ones if I know the UI will still be the same.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#75

Post by sonnyblarney »

Jack000 wrote: post #68
sonnyblarney wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

if your product is a website, the average time on page is 4.6 seconds [1] (a lot of people bounce immediately, lowering the average) the first 10 seconds of ux is extremely important, since it's basically the top of your funnel. [1] https://www.weidert.com/whole_brain_marketing_blog/bid/11696...

Yes, fully agree.

However, as people start to actually use the site, I think they care a lot less about a lot of cosmetic things.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#76

Post by kd5bjo »

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 agree that people never do anything without a reason, with the caveat that “It’s my boss’s pet project and he signs my paycheck” is often a good enough reason to do something.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#77

Post by bsdubernerd »

jordache wrote: post #4

gimp has a horrible UI. If someone tweaks it to act more like Photoshop, I would use it as a PS replacement. The blur filter in GIMP is almost indistinguishable from the blur filter in PS.

I started with Gimp and then moved on to other programs. I was actually mad when Gimp 2.x came out, as it changed the UI and most importantly all the keybindings in incompatible ways.

For me it's exactly the opposite, and I get pissed every time I hear that. Want PS? Keep using it.

I actually found Photoshop one of the worst UIs I ever tried circa ~2005 (I no longer do a lot of photo editing).

It reminds me so much of Autodesk's "Autocad" popularity and market penetration it's saddening (hint: autocad is shit too).

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#78

Post by bsdubernerd »

ddoolin wrote: post #61
cknoxrun wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those three choices are interesting because I would absolutely take the designs of those sites from 10 years ago over the current ones.

Google Maps I can't agree with you on...but Gmail and Facebook, certainly.

I do absolutely agree on Maps. The first maps website was an interactive map that was blazing fast and you could search.

The current version of maps is slow, buggy on anything bug chrome, jarringly slow and almost hides the map in some situations.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#79

Post by spease »

camhart wrote: post #59
calinet6 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as smal…

Yeah, I specifically avoid using Atlassian as much as I can because of how tedious it is to wait ~6 seconds for every UI action to complete.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#80

Post by groestl »

calinet6 wrote: post #26
inertiatic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Well, after the Google Cloud Console redesign of the Datastore UI, visual quality is great, but "Open in new Tab" is broken, the result tables abbreviate dates at the Month field, and in entity edits a timestamp can only be given with Minute resolution. So what should I make of that?
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