If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
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If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
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Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#2[deleted]
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#3Notepad has had some surprising improvements. I've not used it in so long that when I did open it and saw it had tabs, and recover unsaved documents, and dark mode, I wasn't sure it was notepad.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#4I get the point, but doesn't changing floating-point to arbitrary precision so that 10.21 - 10.2 = 0.01 and not 0.0100000000000016 count as a user-visible change? Or should they have put a "now with bugs fixed" sticker on it?
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#5There's a lot of truth to this. Back when I was doing UI for a big bank, I urged them to cleanup their frontend technical debt and unify their interface into a more consistent modern look and feel. They ignored it and I ended up leaving rather than hack into jQuery all day.
They understandably emphasized stability over replacing tested components, which financial is often known for. However I think their visible sign of improvement to the customer is severely lacking even today (this was five years ago), especially compared to their competitors. My overall feel is that the site is brittle regardless of what's happening under the hood.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#6This article needs an update to after this version where Microsoft used a touch-friendly calculator that took up half the screen and somehow took a second+ to load.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#7Notepad has had some surprising improvements. I've not used it in so long that when I did open it and saw it had tabs, and recover unsaved documents, and dark mode, I wasn't sure it was notepad.
I remember when Ctrl+S in notepad didn't save, that one took a surprisingly long time to arrive.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#8There's a lot of truth to this. Back when I was doing UI for a big bank, I urged them to cleanup their frontend technical debt and unify their interface into a more consistent modern look and feel. They ignored it and I ended up leaving rather than hack into jQuery all day. They understandably emphasized stability over replacing tested components, which financial is often known for. However I think their visible sign…
At some point you're making a choice between old users and new users. And the number of old users will only decrease if you don't have new users.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#9I get the point, but doesn't changing floating-point to arbitrary precision so that 10.21 - 10.2 = 0.01 and not 0.0100000000000016 count as a user-visible change? Or should they have put a "now with bugs fixed" sticker on it?
I think part of this is that the user would not try 10.21- 10.2 again if they have already seen it fail, but a graphical update alongside denotes that this thing is "new" again.
Re: If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
#10Also applies to competitors that don't look different -- it doesn't matter if they have better features under the hood.