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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

#81

Post by speedplane »

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.

> 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.

You're contradicting yourself here. If someone with authority is convinced that something is a good idea, then they have a reason for doing it. It might be a misguided reason, but it's not just randomness.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#82

Post by superkuh »

Most redesigns make things worse because anything re-designed in the last 10 years has been redesigned for computer interfaces that are small, have bad mechanical user interfaces, and can't even hold open a TCP connection. If it isn't clear, I'm talking about smart phones.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#83

Post by speedplane »

kd5bjo wrote: post #76
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 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.

If it's your boss's pet project, then your boss probably has a reason for doing it, even if it isn't a good one.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#84

Post by blunte »

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…

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost.

It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!"

So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interactive, text fields with labels only approximated by gray text within that field, and on and on.

Many old UIs were uglier but more usable.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#86

Post by speedplane »

groestl wrote: post #80
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…

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?

I loved the old app engine console, it was super fast, and dumped tons of the information you needed to analyze. The new one is slower, and has plenty of UI bugs like the one you mentioned (my pet peave is CTRL+click on many links no longer opens a new tab). On the other hand, look at all the stuff they added! There must be 30 dashboards you can jump into, and yet the new UI makes navigating all of them relatively easy. The old one was great for just app engine, but it would never be able to scale to all the services they currently offer.

Also, they are relatively responsive to developer demands, at least as far as the dashboard is concerned. Not that long ago, if you wanted to export a few seconds of logs, you had to setup a Cloud SQL sink that could suck in gigabytes of logs. Not too helpful if you want to analyze just a few hundred lines. People complained, and now you can export the current view to excel/csv. They've also speeded up load times significantly (it's still not snappy though).

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#87

Post by mrighele »

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.

On the other side, it will be less usable while i have to relearn how to use it. This is not an issue if it happens from time to time, you pay upfront a decrease of productivity and will be rewarded greatly later on. But in the era of SaaS we are constantly subject to a stream of redesigns, sometimes small, other times global. You cannot finish adapting to a change that another comes.

I don't know about others, but for me is deeply frustrating.

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#89

Post by masswerk »

A redesign should be never about yourself but about your users only. The raison d'être of the UI is not representation.

If you're still eager to do a periodical redesign, keep it to your error pages. So did I, just today [0]. This way, the web may also stay a fun place, full of potential discoveries.

[0] https://www.masswerk.at/404

Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time

#90

Post by mjburgess »

atoav wrote: post #30
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 sounddesi…

On the flip side, you could see a person selling their labour as having some right/stake in doing something which interests them.

These outcomes are then compromises which give something to the producer, as well as to the customer.

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