UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
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UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
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Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#2Completely disagree with the OP.
I have enough scar tissue to believe bad UI or even the one that's not pleasing or inspiring receives lot lower engagement from users than having a clean, snappy and beautiful UI.
The OP's claims can be easily disproved by contradiction. If UI improvements didn't make a difference, A/B testing on designs wouldn't have resulted in massive improvements.
Making design more accessible, and attractive often helps beat the asymptotes in user consumption of a lot of products.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#3I think the author is mostly saying that, unless you site is horridly designed, that incremental updates where required can have just as much impact on the bottom line as complete sitewide redesigns, especially when the point of new design is often misguided, i.e. simply trying to keep up with the latest design trends.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#4gimp 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.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#5I'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 workflows --- are often dismissed with "sorry, you can't do that anymore" or "here's a (longer and more cumbersome) workaround to do it".
I'm sorry, but besides fixing the UI where it impacts the usability of your application, no one is raving about how a redesign makes the application any better.
This brings up a great point: if you examine user's comments on redesigns that didn't really fix things, you'll find that the positive ones are all about how it looks or feels and tend to be vague, while the negative ones will almost all be very specific criticisms about precisely which part of their workflows got broken. In any other context the latter would be treated as bug reports --- very clear ones at that --- to be investigated and fixed; but it seems a lot of designers are inclined to simply "close"/ignore them all as "they don't like/understand what I did, maybe they just hate me."
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#6Couldn'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 click or two now take many clicks or are simply no longer doable. The UIs are not intuitive. The shitty designers never design things properly so when I have two windows side by side, they still put two or three menu bars on the left side, leaving no space for the actual content. The redesigns are shit and clearly, they are done too appeal to some dumb ass hipster aesthetic of the designers who clearly don't understand anything about user experience or usability. Just fucking stop before all your users leave.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#7gimp 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.
Did you try Krita?
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#8> You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go to get good tacos. You don't use Facebook because the UI is nice, you use it to talk to your friends and share photos.
I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscrutable icons and I can't figure out its mental model to save my life. And there are many more sites/apps that frustrate me so much that I abandon them for better-designed choices, or even for nothing at all, because at least doing nothing doesn't make me angry.
This function-over-form attitude bugs the hell out of me. People (especially designers) who think that design doesn't really matter as long as the function is okay may not notice the mass of former users who simply throw up their hands and refuse to use their product at all.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#9> You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go to get good tacos. You don't use Facebook because the UI is nice, you use it to talk to your friends and share photos. I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscr…
>I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscrutable icons and I can't figure out its mental model to save my life.
probably because of unnecessary redesigns.
Re: UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
#10> You don't use Google maps because it looks nice, you use it because it tells you where to go to get good tacos. You don't use Facebook because the UI is nice, you use it to talk to your friends and share photos. I actually don't use Google Maps -- because it's a crazy mess of buttons and menus that get in my way of trying to navigate. I actually don't use Facebook -- because it's a horrible dog's breakfast of inscr…
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 easiest way to get pictures of the kids to family. I could setup a website, but I can't imagine it would be as easy or as effective. With the emphasis on effective.
edit:s/primarily/preferrably/