
Users hate change - InvOfSmallC
https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c245e57dc
======
flohofwoe
My pet theory is that every software product has a "peak version". Before that
peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly
obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the
peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the
product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and
to 'keep the team busy'.

Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the
roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it
becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and
existing features start to suffer because the "maintenance surface" becomes
bigger and bigger.

What _should_ happen of course is that the product's feature set is frozen at
the "peak version", and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that's
a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription
models and "software as a service" which they like so much. From the
customer's point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for
free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don't add
any value, right?

Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in
satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright
- meaning the 'average customer' (which doesn't exist btw) isn't pissed off
enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.

~~~
yoz-y
Subscription model is actually way better if you don't want to end up with
feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever
fix bugs and improve performance.

If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody
who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.

~~~
nofunsir
"everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops."

That's... how it should work. You don't get to hook into their wallets for
time and all eternity.

everybody who wanted your <shovel> bought it and then the revenue stops.

everybody who wanted your <light bulb> bought it and then the revenue stops.

everybody who wanted your <real estate> bought it and then the revenue stops.

... and then you go do something else!

That is the precise mechanism that drives the economy forward.

~~~
ken
Except that revenue stream ends before the "fix bugs and improve performance"
step. People buy based on screenshots/demos/trials/reviews, and those don't
expose the deep bugs you run into 3 months later when doing real work.

Shovels break, light bulbs burn out. Then you go buy another one, and there's
a good chance it's better than the earlier one. The manufacturer keeps working
to improve the quality, and people keep paying them for this. "Buy a software
license once for all time" is not analogous to this.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality

Call me cynical, but I think it's naive to make this claim.

Manufacturers don't optimize quality, they optimize profits. Even if there's
sufficient competition, manufacturers don't race upwards to improve quality,
they race downwards to reduce the cost and undercut the competition.

You can see this in kitchen appliances. People complain about how they don't
last as long as they used to and are harder to repair. That's because when a
customer sees a $30 blender and a $50 blender on the shelf, they will nearly
always pick the $30 blender, even if the $50 blender is a higher quality.
There was a race to the bottom on pricing, and corners had to be cut.

~~~
zxcmx
Information asymmetry is also a problem. The $50 blender might be trading on a
beloved brand name... but with the metal gears replaced by plastic and glue in
place of the fasteners. How can the average person tell?

What you really want to read is reviews from 3 years in the future but you
can’t. So you buy the $30 blender because it’s too hard to assess whether the
$50 one is worth it.

I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality. The
first step in stemming the tide of garbage is being informed.

In the software world SaaS tends to optimise for growth and customer
retention, which is probably better aligned to meet people’s needs than
optimising for first sale.

~~~
jackweirdy
> I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality.

I didn’t see this at the time; if you remember the title or still have the
link could you please post it?

~~~
zxcmx
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503194)

------
johnday
It's interesting to compare the user responses to updates by Facebook and
Twitter respectively.

Facebook's UI has changed significantly over the last 15 or so years. Features
have appeared and disappeared, boxes have been arranged and rearranged. But
there's rarely a big fuss beyond it getting a little slower each time (roughly
commensurate with consumer hardware speedup, in fact). People don't really
notice and they don't really care. People originally balked at the reactions
feature, calling it gauche and unnecessary - but now people use it as part of
the language of the platform without a second thought.

Compare with Twitter. Every UI "overhaul" they've ever done has been received
in a hugely negative way. The only change which has been remotely successful
was the 140/280 switch.

The difference is threefold:

First, Twitter's UI changes have been big. They skip over incremental changes
and go straight for gigantic overhauls. This requires people re-learn the
language of the site completely every couple of years.

Second, these changes have invariably been coupled with user-hostile design
decisions. The obvious one this time round is the automatic switching to "AI
sorted timeline" on every visit. No wonder people have an almost pavlovian
response to the design changes.

And thirdly, while Facebook's changes are usually to accommodate changing
usage patterns, new features, or new hardware, Twitter's updates are very
transparently pointless. They offer zero improvement to the user experience
for any sector of the market. Every change causes people to question why they
use the site in the first place.

Gosh I didn't expect this to be such a long rant. Turns out I have a lot to
say about the terrible design decisions made over in Twitter land. The
conclusion is this: people _don 't_ hate change. They hate change which makes
their lives worse than the status quo would have done. It's not complicated.

~~~
wycy
People do hate change, regardless of how much better that change is. I don't
think I've ever seen a UI redesign over which users didn't get into a massive
uproar. I certainly saw the massive uproar any time FB introduced a UI change.

Sure, some UI redesigns are just plain bad and users are justified in hating
them. The twitter redesign _does_ appear to be clunky/bad as you noted. The
new Reddit seems to be another case of the redesign being pretty bad.

But users will unfailingly hate every major redesign without fail regardless
of how much better it is. If users had their way, Windows 10 would still look
like Windows 98. Facebook would still look like this [0].

[0] [https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/20...](https://boostlikes-bc85.kxcdn.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/2007-Facebook.jpg)

~~~
zzzcpan
> regardless of how much better it is.

No, the simple truth is it's not better if users hate it. It means it failed
to account for existing users and their use cases.

~~~
wycy
With that rationale you literally can't change anything ever. Version 1.0 ever
after.

It _is_ better if it ultimately just takes time for them to like it. The same
people who initially hated it will most likely grow to like it. When we
migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last year, my boss was extremely upset--
but he was just as upset a decade ago having to upgrade to Windows 7 in the
first place.

Users come around eventually.

~~~
rurp
God I hate this kind of paternalistic reasoning from developers. Nobody is
saying that you can never update software ever, just that those updates should
be driven by a clear functional reason. Implementing a change that you know
your users will hate just to switch to a "modern" UI does not serve users.

> Users come around eventually.

How do you know? A number of apps I use have overhauled their UI in a way that
made it look shinier at a glance, but categorically worse for actually using.
I either stopped using them if the change was too awful, or eventually just
stopped leaving negative feedback once it was clear the devs didn't care.
Never once have I hated an update at first and later thought to myself, "Wow I
was so wrong, this update is actually amazing, I'm glad the dev team ignored
all of that negative feedback and forced it on their existing users".

------
jedberg
Two related stories. At one point way back in the day, eBay wanted to change
the background color of the main page from yellow to white. They didn't just
make the change one day, instead they slowly changed the hex code every couple
of days so the change was gradual. When it was complete, some people would say
stuff like, "Hey, didn't the background used to be yellow, when did that
change?".

When I worked at reddit I told this story, and we ended up using the same
technique to move from a two line display to a three line display. Each day we
slight changed the spacing to make it larger, until we had enough room for the
three lines, and then we switched to three lines. Some people even responded
to people's complaints by saying, "but it doesn't take up any more space than
the old two line display!". Of course this was reddit, and at the time the
code was totally open source, so someone found the daily checkins to change
the spacing and outed us, forcing us to put the "compress the link display"
checkbox into the preferences, which is still there to this day.

~~~
shawndrost
Wow. From where I'm sitting it seems like Reddit went to the ends of the earth
to make users happy during periods of change, and wound up with a prevailingly
negative reputation (in its own community) for its efforts. Was that the
impression internally as well?

~~~
opportune
Reddit's UX was perfect from a (my) user point of view in like 2011.
Everything added or changed since then has been either unnecessary stuff that
nobody asked for, adding social network features that aren't what reddit was
originally meant for, or a way to better serve ads.

The only thing reddit needed was to improve the mobile experience, which they
kinda did, except they have tons of annoying dark patterns in it to push you
towards the app.

------
_nalply
My wife has handicaps (deaf and cerebral palsy). She gets nervous and
mistrustful if something has changed. She hates updates and asked me why the
companies can't let the software alone.

She has a point. Updates and nagging dialogs have a cost which is higher for
non-IT people. Imagine your old neighbor being confused if he should allow
that update or not and being stressed about because these update requests
don't stop coming in.

~~~
redbeard0x0a
The best analogy of finished software I have heard is this:

> Software is done, like mowing the lawn is done.

We live in an imperfect world, if we want to keep ourselves safe and prevent
bad actors out of our data/technology. Updates are a part of the process. You
don't mow your lawn once, it has to be maintained. Which is the same as
software.

This is something that we would be all better for if we could teach this
concept to everybody so that updates are just a normal part of life.

~~~
coupdejarnac
I do not buy this. You're equating security updates with UI changes. Pointless
UI changes get a lot more frustrating as you get older. What we really need is
software with really long support versions that minimize bullshit churn in UI
and usability.

~~~
mgbmtl
Old version support has a cost for the company supporting it. I guess it shows
to the maturity of the company when they do. It's not easy to pull off.

As a dev on a mid-size project, I'd say that those UI changes often have two
sides, with people who will also complain "why can't you just fix/change X,
it's such a small change, but so annoying". Everyone wants their issue fixed,
but not the issues of others.

Our project went from having two versions (stable and old-version), to just
one, because the community of users had split into two, with much fewer
developers working on fixing the latest version (because their company mostly
supported users on the old version, not deploying new projects on the latest
version, very understandably risk-averse people).

Removing the old-version made a few developers angry, but 80% of them rallied
and now the project is much more sustainable (i.e. we're not big enough to
afford the split). Eventually we introduced a paid version of the old-version
supported for 6 months, with a stretch goal to extend to 12 months if people
supported it. Only a handful are paying for it. Others are now happy on the
latest, which became more robust as more people are using it.

~~~
torstenvl
> _Old version support has a cost for the company supporting it._

Old UI support has zero cost to it.

Arbitrary new UIs have significant cost to them.

~~~
hinkley
UI is surface area. Having 2 UIs vastly increases the surface area of the
application, which means tons of testing. It also means all of your developers
have to dedicate resources to remembering 2 or 3 versions of the UI, and to an
extent the history of those changes.

There are also degrees to which it's more difficult to memorize two loosely
related things than it is to memorize two completely separate ones, because
your brain keeps trying to treat them as similar even when they are not.

------
oneepic
You know, a lot of users would be more ok with change if it was demoed to them
first, or given a heads-up, or they were given an opportunity to give feedback
that co's _actually_ use, and improve the product. A lot of people I know
would say something to the effect of, "[Google/Microsoft/Apple/other co] can
fly me out and have me test every product. I'll do it for free." Just because
the practice of forced system updates and breaking changes is so god damn
frustrating and it happens so often.

Back when I worked in medical software, it fucked up doctors' and nurses'
workflow very, very badly for a whole workday (could be anywhere from 8-24+
hours), and it might stay the same way for _years_. Because even if they tell
us to revert it, it's so low on _our_ priority list that it just stays there
forever. Users can complain forever and nothing will change because we refuse
to prioritize the very thing they're asking for.

Tech co's don't really have a satisfying answer to this issue IMO. The most we
do is bring in a few people off the street every few months to test the whole
system, but usually we seem to just say "LG2M" when _another_ engineer on the
team says it should be fine. That's an engineer, not a user. You won't get
quality feedback.

I guess when you keep telling new engineers some dark shit like, "Users don't
know what they want", your industry will get pretty callous to its customer
base.

------
tmikaeld
I just think of Microsoft when I read these.

Every time they change something in Windows, they never take the old thing
away but instead keep both. Which means there's a myriad of ways to get to the
control panel. And there's multiple variants of the control panel UI...

Outlook is another good example, there's 3 different UI's where we can
add/remove accounts.

Result: New users use the new (default) UI, old users use the old UI, admins
use what's quickest.

~~~
nemacol
The real kick in the beans from MS is the new UI lacks anything beyond basic
functionality in the new UI. For example, Win10 (1803) Mouse settings you can
modify: Left/Right handed, Scroll Wheel lines, Scroll inactive windows when
you hover.

For every other change you have to click "Additional mouse options" and are
taken to the old UI.

MS Win10, and to a lesser extent Server 2016-19 has increased the number of
clicks it takes me to get to the thing dramatically.

In 7 I relied heavily on the search feature - it was wonderful to type
"Programs and" hit enter and get to the page I want. Today they have hidden
(in win10) those old UI screens.

It is frustrating.

I would accept the new UI if it had feature parity, but it can't even perform
the most basic tasks (mouse pointer speed for example).

Edit - Spelling.

~~~
bitwize
Use the cortana bar to search for control panel settings in Windows 10.

The UX for system settings is still like barf, arbitrarily choosing between
two UIs depending on the setting is some shit that wouldn't even fly in
desktop Linux in 2019, and was an artifact of the Win8pocalypse which
Microsoft later walked back. But searching for settings is still possible.

~~~
saltminer
I think that the settings search has gotten worse in 10. "Disk management" no
longer returns the relevant MMC, for example, I have to search "disk
partitions". Last night, "add or remove" defaulted to a web search, so I
searched "programs" and "Add or Remove Programs" was the first result...I
still can't figure out that one.

------
bla3
I've seen many UI rollouts that carefully track user happiness metrics. All UI
changes have in common that user happiness goes down for a short time after
the change -- but for good changes, it goes back up and to an even higher
level than before. So it's expected that right after a change people are
unhappy, which is where Nielsen's (sensible) suggestion comes from.

The problem is of course that UX designers get so used to dismissing that
initial criticism that they sometimes dismiss valid criticism that leads to
long-term user unhappiness as well.

~~~
panic
How do you know your metrics actually measure user happiness?

------
empath75
This is just curmudgeonliness backed by nothing at all.

You probably shouldn't do major redesigns with no real benefit to the user
(I'm looking at you, reddit), but if you're adding or improving functionality,
then feel free to incrementally improve your site constantly. People will get
used to constant small improvements and will miss them if they stop.

Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn
how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy.

~~~
shawndrost
"Users don't hate change, they hate arbitrary change that forces them to learn
how to use your site again, or that removes features they enjoy."

How does this square with the overwhelmingly negative early responses to
facebook's news feed, or reactions? Would you characterize them as
"arbitrary"? I use those as examples because they now seem widely loved, so
they seem like good (non-arbitrary) design to me, but they were poorly
received.

~~~
opportune
Is the facebook news feed actually widely loved now? I only hear yearning for
the old chrono feed

------
stcredzero
_Firstly: humans don 't resist change when it's something that they asked for,
they resist things being imposed upon them against their will. There is an
incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that "we know best",
this is a very parent-child style relationship: "Mother knows best", that both
disempowers and disengages customers._

Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times Yes!

Here's the right way to do a UI revamp: Introduce your powerful, better, shiny
new UI as a clone of the old UI. Once the clone is of high fidelity, then
introduce the ability to switch to new "skins" or new "modes" which have the
new powerful features, or the better UX. Perhaps even set up a scenario with 2
or more competing to win new users.

The proper way is to let users discover and move to the new thing. Imposing
new UI/UX on users just degrades goodwill, and it also hides data about where
the new version has flaws or needs improvement. Adopting change needs to be a
"pull" and not a "push."

------
infinity0
At Google years ago, the UX designers coined the term "change aversion" and
used it in exactly this arrogant way that this article is talking about. They
even used this concept to dismiss the empirical results of UX experiments
_that they themselves conducted_ with regular users, that indicated this
effect. Lol how do I science?

This resulted in lots of internal memes mocking these UX designers.

Totally agree with everything this article says, fuck arrogant UX designers
coming into my office and rearranging my workspace, fuck you coming into my
house and rearranging my furniture.

(If you attempt to justify this by "it's not your product it's the company's",
you are really missing the point, and you shouldn't be a UX designer. Human
emotions don't care about legal structures.)

~~~
brianpgordon
Does anyone know if this organizational dissonance still exists at Google? I'd
really like to think that there are Googlers on the inside who appropriately
appalled by GMail. With the latest redesign I literally decided that it was
worth $5/mo of my money to pay Fastmail so that I wouldn't have to endure
GMail anymore.

------
wstuartcl
I agree 100%. In my view every change you make to your software (that is not a
bug fix) is just as likley to reduce the perceived value for your current
customers as to increase it. Spread these changes over time and you segment
the customer base across different states of pleased and unhappy. Naturally as
the customer base denormalizes against any given state affinity you reduce the
overall population's feelings about your app.

IMHO this is one of the hardest problems to solve with long lived
applications. What changes can be made, what features can be added or changed
and what "look and feel" changes can be made without tilting the affinity of
the current users vs expanding the value proposition for new ones.

------
SomeHacker44
> The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being
> the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off
> that I'll move, no matter what the cost.

This is why I gave up my iPhone X. I just hated constantly re-learning Apple's
new paradigm du-jour, and I absolutely loathed FaceID and the notch.

Now I have a OnePlus 7 Pro, with "Touch ID" and no notch, and except for some
friends occasionally saying "why are you not blue" I am happy as a clam. I
never want a "Face ID" and I never want a "notch." (I don't care about bezels,
etc.)

Now, I'm considering dropping the rest of Apple from my life, after a 15 year
Apple-only lifestyle. It's really the "touch bar," when all I really want is
an ESC key and real F keys, and the fact that I have to repair my laptop every
six months because some key or other is broken again. And, it's not even a
"wait 20 minutes while we replace the keyboard" but more of a "wait a few days
to a week" and god hope they don't charge you $700. Ridiculous.

~~~
egorfine
Getting rid of F keyboard is a major fuckup from Apple. I am very far of
suggesting that they don't know what they do, but I am yet to see a software
developer happy with the Touch Bar - after all these years.

------
monkin
People don't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them are
lazy, and don't want to change their habits, no matter how bad they are.

I know from my experience, that most valuable users will contact you directly
(e-mail, support, twitter, other way) to describe their experiences before and
after the change, telling you what exactly hurts them.

Rest of them are pointless trolls with "First Comment Rule". What is that?
First negative comment will spark negative discussion, so trolls spark them to
pressure on company/product. There is a lot of companies that will write, "I
am sorry", and will start to move backwards because of that.

How to live with that? Listen, adapt, yet don't care about everything or
everyone. :)

~~~
tabtab
Re: _People don 't hate changes, they hate learning new things. Most of them
are lazy_

Changes often don't solve anything of significance, just reshuffle stuff to be
different or to be "cool". When you deal with dozens of apps and applications
a day, having to relearn a UI is an annoyance.

Take the MS-Office "ribbon" change. Perhaps it may improve newbie learning a
rough guess of 15%, but those of us who got used to the existing tool-bar by
rote memorization were slowed for a few months. The ribbon changed one
arbitrariness for another arbitrariness from our perspective. I can point out
several irrationalities in the ribbon.

------
mung
Adobe should read this and understand it. Veteran users of Photoshop,
Illustrator and InDesign get updates that change the default way of doing
something and they don’t even provide a UI to change back. Don’t fix long-
standing bugs, just change something that didn’t need changing. That and the
major performance downgrades to support unwanted features.

------
Rainymood
I love how the author shouts from the rooftops the following

>This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric (...)

While this whole post reeks with entitlement and egocentrism - but from _his_
perspective, so that is OK!

To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger user
base than himself and only thinks about _his_ benefit and how the changes
affect _him_ and how _he_ uses the product.

>Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do
for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out
of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the
vague and nebulous future.

This is simply not true. Depending on what you buy (a physical product like a
bike) or a software subscription (like photoshop), you get those upgrades
whether you want it or not. You don't want it? Then DONT BUY THE PRODUCT.
Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don't like
it? You go to the freaking competitor!

I understand the authors frustrations but customers have the ultimate final
say in anything by voting with their wallet.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _To me, it feels like the author is incapable of empathising with a larger
> user base than himself and only thinks about his benefit and how the changes
> affect him and how he uses the product._

I disagree. "Users hate change" is a meme that's generally accepted in the
industry; the post applies empathy to dig into the reasons why it seems that
"users hate change".

> _Customers have the ultimate power: voting with their wallet. You don 't
> like it? You go to the freaking competitor!_

"Voting with your wallet" in a non-commodity market doesn't work. Doubly so if
we're talking about complex products with complex feature sets, making each
essentially an unique animal. Triply so if the "feature" of "not mindlessly
messing with the UI/featureset" is impossible to predict ahead of time.

~~~
dubcanada
"Users hate change" is it a meme?

If your favorite what ever changed, do you like it? Or do you immediately go
what is this? Regardless if it was good/needed.

There is obvious parts where a change may be good or needed, and those are
easier to accept. But if you deem X to be good enough does a change that
increases the ability to do Y speed by like 5% really matter if it changes
everything. No.

"Voting with your wallet" always matters. Doesn't matter if it's free or not.
It always matters. If half of anyones customers stopped using the product
because of a redesign, they would consider alternatives. The problem is people
complain and stay, and 5 weeks later they are used to it and don't care
anymore until the next change.

~~~
bananocurrency
"Voting with your wallet" always matters. Doesn't matter if it's free or not.
It always matters.

Do you understand how discouraging the network effect is on free products? Any
social media app that breaks out is quickly bought by the big players and they
reset the score again.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
I did not like the change from old reddit to new reddit. Remember Digg v 1.0
to 2.0 and how it made it sink?

~~~
andygates
New Reddit remains slow, which engendered badwill.

New Twitter, on the other hand, messes up its primary product - the users'
feed - to give unfollowed content. It breaks the idea that the user is
curating their personal feed, and that is problematic.

But it's fast and acceptably customizable.

------
ken
Some corollaries:

Upgrading from v1 to v2 of your product is no different than migrating from
your product to your competitor's product, except you probably have better
compatibility. If your competitors offer good-enough compatibility, or you
break backwards compatibility, even this advantage is lost.

Just as with data structures, we should build software itself as generally
immutable. The successor to version X, in most cases, is version Y of
something else. The exception seems to be filling out features. If your v1 is
good but sparse, then adding missing features is an obvious win for users,
too. That means, though, that you need to publish your roadmap. Customers
can't plan around arbitrary releases and mystery features.

------
emilfihlman
This resonates with me so damn well. I've witnessed multiple absolutely
idiotic changes that completely disregard user experience because Change.

~~~
GrumpyNl
Like the new twitter layout in a browser.

~~~
Avamander
I hate it, it breaks loading a lot of Tweets for me, it also wastes a lot of
screen space for some stupid reason on my wide monitors. I just hate it.

------
codingdave
This article is correct, but you can take it to a higher level of abstraction.

All change is interpreted by how it impacts the individual. The article laid
out one possible scenario where this results in bad will. But it is broader
than that. It is broader than product design. If you look at the people in
your world, and think about how they will react to a change, you'll get a
picture of how a change will come across, whether that is a product change, a
process change, an organizational change, etc.

At the end of it all, it boils down to empathy - the more you can think about
change in the context of how it impacts specific people, the better you'll be
able to manage it.

------
Wowfunhappy
I really, really, really like Snow Leopard[1], but there are a _some_ features
they’ve added that I really like, such as autosaving, fullscreen, and word
lookup.

I’d still go back to Snow Leopard if I could, I don’t quite agree Apple has
added nothing of value. There are things I would miss.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224370)

------
Causality1
I'll add to the OP that implementing new features isn't the only reason change
happens. Many developers and marketers have a fetish for change for the sake
of change. There have been many times when a product I use has undergone a
redesign, except along with a visual redesign most of its features took twice
as long to access. Information that was available with one click now required
two or three.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are several XDDs that drive this; fad, resume, and other driven-
development methodologies.

"Implemented site in X" may not help either users or operators, but may
advance the developer's career. Or evenmerely provide the developer the
impression it might.

------
ptero
I take a view in between of the quoted article and the video it criticizes.
There are costs to changes. The key, to me, whether those changes are
outweighed by functionality improvement, as on average perceived by _users_.
There will always be folks who do not like the change, but if the majority of
the users like new functionality (maybe after a bit of griping), or most
strong advocates among users _love_ it, this is probably a change for the
better.

Unfortunately, many software changes are done without bringing the benefit for
the users (e.g., "we are switching to framework/model X, so UX is now
different; deal with it"). Those changes are pretty hard to justify. Not
always impossible (e.g., you may have reached the limits of older design and
have to spend a lot on devops, etc.), but hard and for those cases the company
should bend over backwards to minimize pain for users. My 2c.

------
vasili111
The most important downside for me of website/software UI redesign is that I
already know where to look for what I am looking for. For example, reddit, I
am comfortable with old design and do not want to spend my time on exploring
new design, I do not want to spend time on it because I have lot of other
things to spend my time on.

------
mschuster91
Guess this is related to the abomination called "new Twitter UI". While the
redesign is an abomination, with Twitter especially there is another thing in
play: they do not listen to or consult their users in any way, no matter if
ordinary users or third party app developers.

Third party developers want to be able to use all the features available on
the platform - especially when it comes to DMs, polls and media. But Twitter
has locked down all that stuff and introduced ridiculous rate limits on that
what remains open - to the point that writing a full featured client is not
worth the time any more.

Users want to get rid of harrassment - the calls of "Twitter, ban the f...ing
Nazis" are years old. Instead, Twitter still doesn't even allow banning quote-
tweeting - meaning, a large account quote-tweets a small-ish account and the
followers of the large account then dog-pile on the quoted tweet. Mass
flagging exploits automated AI filters leading to (especially) sex workers
being automatically banned, with next to zero accountability for Twitter and
sometimes requiring court orders. But instead of working on real pain points
like the ones I just described, Twitter rather works away silently on a crap
design, forces it onto their users overnight and doesn't even give an option
to opt out or to submit feedback.

Of course users feel like they're being treated like shit.

------
zzzcpan
> Secondly: Your change probably isn't for the better. Not for me, not for the
> majority of existing customers.

Things could be much worse. When the change suddenly prevents users from doing
X, something they invested all that time, attention and effort to be able to
do all without an option to change back. All software where updates are
controlled by a party that develops it is at constant risk of becoming a piece
of junk for and frustrating at least some of its users or most or all of them.
In comparison it's not that big of a deal if software is a new competing
alternative, like Wayland for example. If it breaks lots of use cases for
existing users it will simply not get anywhere, only fragment ecosystem a bit
with new niches.

------
Zenst
I know I hate change, though some changes that I loath initially, can and do
grow on me. Though there are always some that do not. But as a whole, most
change is good. Just that initial impact and we go from an autonomous
interaction from various queues to having a new layout, sequence, feature or
even font. Those put us off out pace and for want of another way of putting it
- mess with your mojo. Over time, we adjust, some changes quicker than others,
other changes take longer. Few never at all take. But then we all have those,
and if enough users still dislike those changes, they tend to get rolled-back,
but not all.

I will also add another tangent to this:

We tend to overlike change we create or instigate.

------
dfps
Yes, but users will accept it and be satisfied if the change is good. How manu
of us have tools we continue to use (or long for when using alternatives)
because they worked so well.

Most tech seems to ignore usability, though.

Samsung galaxy updates suck.

Korg Electribe rules.

------
wrs
>when you have a product that works, and an existing customer base - freeze
it. ... simply leave the product the way it is, bar minor BAU and bug-fix
work. Instead devote effort into building a new, next-generation product ...

As a counterexample, Apple did this with Final Cut Pro and suffered years of
criticism from customers for “abandoning” their installed base. Of course,
being Apple, they didn’t seem to care. :) The new version eventually got to
parity and beyond, but in the meantime people were seriously unhappy (and I’m
sure many still are).

People don’t like change, and people also don’t like being abandoned.

------
notSupplied
"We know what's best for the user" is assuming you are even designing for the
user in the first place.

The user is often not the customer, and design changes are ultimately here to
serve the company, not the user:

\- How can we increase number of ads users will tolerate? \- How do we
increase the amount of content users share? \- How do we increase the number
of likes/hearts they send?

I wouldn't be surprised if the lionshare of user backlash comes from decisions
that weren't meant to serve the user in the first place.

------
jhallenworld
Developers also hate change, unless it's their own change.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Of course it depends on the nature of the specific change. I'm sure lots of
developers really appreciate bug fixes, especially for bugs they've
encountered, let alone developed workarounds or patches.

But there's a reason (really, lots of reasons) why it's a great idea to pin
one's third-party dependencies. Change is, at least, _costly_ ; at beast
trivially so (but never literally nothing).

------
jbverschoor
Guess what. Programmeurs hate change directer by others too. Otherwise we’d
all be working in the “perfect” language, and all this legacy wouldnt be be
here. It’s simply an egoistic/arrogant point of view of “the designer”, which
can be a programmer, pm, visual designer, ceo, anyone really, who thinks he’s
better and smarter than the rest, and thinks he holds the perfect solution.
Sometimes this turns out right. Often it doesnt

------
tmaly
I agree with this post for the most part.

MS Excel when they switched to the ribbon UI was a huge problem for existing
users.

I have had certain software running with antiquated UIs, but I keep them in
place as users know how to use them. They have enough on their plates that
they do not want to have to learn something new and deal with the cognitive
overload.

    
    
      If the old way works, they will stick with it, as long as it gets the job done.

------
bibyte
I think there shouldn't be change in a software project just for the sake of
change. It should be okay to just maintain a project without changing major
parts of it. Unfortunately there are some projects that just go the opposite
way. Major UI changes every few months just for the sake of it. As for myself
I am not opposed to changes, but only when it's meaningful.

------
xwdv
New incoming users love change, it can sometimes be the reason they even came
to your platform. Always remember the user you serve.

------
chadlavi
that's an incredibly expensive and complex way to avoid some friction for some
users. What about breaking changes to APIs? Do you end up with two completely
separate backends and DBs to maintain as well? Do you just completely clone
your entire product every time a big change happens -- and do you hire enough
new people to handle that work?

Probably not, you probably just stretch existing engineers too far to maintain
old stuff.

Seems better to only introduce breaking behavior changes when they're really
necessary, and move the entire product to the new design. And if a new feature
or a change in nav is enough to lose you customers, then your product might
not be that compelling in the first place.

------
donclark
Why not allow users to toggle btwn versions of software/UI/etc?

~~~
yoz-y
Because in many cases this is not possible. For example when Twitter added
polls no other client than the default one was able to display them. If they
kept some older version around they would not have feature parity. Then they
introduced threads, these would look weird. Now imagine if they introduced
nesting, the database model could change in a way that all older versions
would require a substantial update. Maintaining an older version may very well
mean maintaining two products and two synced versions of the database. Now you
have doubled your engineering cost.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
It would probably be only marginally more expensive (for Twitter specifically)
for them to add changes in a way that's backwards compatible with older
clients, so I don't think this argument is particularly convincing. I think,
because it's somewhat plausible, they pushed it, but because they really
wanted to control all of the clients, to increase their advertising revenue.

------
z3t4
The hardest part in software development is probably to _not_ add new
features. Learned the hard way. (The things users tell you they want, is
rarely what they actually want.)

------
csense
If Facebook had read this in 2006, I'd still use it every day.

------
kazinator
No change is just one change; it's a set of changes.

No set of changes is strictly better for strictly every user.

"For the better" is often just better for that user who happens to be the
developer.

------
skybrian
This is why products are different than services. You don't own a service, and
if they want to change it, that's their business.

------
vjagrawal1984
Basecamp.com has this model, every new redesign/upgrade become a new product,
co-existing with older one.

------
MockObject
iTunes hasn't been intuitive to me in ages. Every update in the past 10 years
has made it more confusing.

------
s1mpl3
Users

~~~
preordained
Who needs em? Everyone ;)

------
agumonkey
We need adequation. Timing or at least clear path toward improvement.

------
flaque
This is wildly dependent on your original design actually being good.

Many products are NOT good at first and constantly redesign until they get
something good. It's silly to give blanket advice "never redesign your
product."

------
miguelmota
Users are lazy creatures of habit. Energy conservation.

------
jasonlotito
The author completely ignores the part where the customers want the changes.
This entire post is incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric, as well as
being wrong-headed on several counts.

------
gridlockd
> "This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric, as well
> as being wrong-headed on several counts."

From a user's perspective, perhaps. That doesn't make it incorrect, however.

> "Firstly: humans don't resist change when it's something that they asked
> for, they resist things being imposed upon them against their will."

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

~ not actually Henry Ford

> "There is an incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that
> "we know best", this is a very parent-child style relationship: "Mother
> knows best", that both disempowers and disengages customers."

It's not that we know best, it's that we know _better_ than to just listen to
users. We have all the data and research. You have an opinion because you're
upset.

> "Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can
> do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying
> money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do
> something in the vague and nebulous future."

We are generally aware of this. However, when we develop a product, we have a
process that, for various reasons, goes beyond your particular narrow view of
our product.

> "When you as a product manager or designer or PO or whatever decide that
> your product should do A, B and C too, I don't care. I don't want those
> features, I didn't pay for them."

Indeed, not all user share the same requirements and therefore we don't
develop the product for any one user in particular.

> "When you as a product person change the way that I have to use the product
> in order to do X, you are asking me to spend time, effort and attention to
> change my habits around X in order to do something differently, which may
> (or may not) benefit me in the future."

We apologize for the inconvenience.

> "In all likelyhood you made it easier for new users to learn X. I don't care
> about new users."

This is where your and our interests clearly diverge.

> "Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it
> more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does
> X instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in
> your product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do
> something in a different product."

In all likelyhood, you won't. The cost of learning an entirely different
product will likely still be greater than learning the changes we made.
Furthermore, there is the cost of another purchase, as well as the sunk cost
on your previous purchase.

> "The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being
> the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I'll become so pissed off
> that I'll move, no matter what the cost."

Really, _no matter the cost_? Who are you going to move to? The hypothetical
competitor that _never_ changes their product?

> "The vast majority of the effort that designers spend on look and feel,
> typeography, colour palettes, image choice and placement, tone of voice,
> button placement, size and style and a host of other things are of marginal
> value at best."

Design tends to either go over people's heads entirely, or it's highly
important. I suppose you're in group A. Still, a product that hasn't had a
facelift in a decade will have an appearance of being outdated, even if the
underlying technology is modern.

> "Thirdly: the idea that you can just tell your customers to suck it up is a
> relic of last-century marketing that relied on captive customer bases and
> lack of customer knowledge, awareness and community. Modern customers are,
> in the majority, well informed and highly vocal with other customers in
> their community."

Vocal they are, indeed. A select few of them at least. Despite this, we will
not have _our_ product be held captive by these users.

> "The idea of EPP is thus: when you have a product that works, and an
> existing customer base - freeze it. Instead of a major redisgn because
> 'Material Design is so 2014' simply leave the product the way it is, bar
> minor BAU and bug-fix work. Instead devote effort into building a new, next-
> generation product that addresses (hopefully) a new customer segment, and
> allow existing customers to add this new product to their portfolio for a
> incremental fee. This allows existing customers to self-select into a new
> product, protects revenue and reduces the risk of existing product customers
> leaving due to badwill."

Unfortunately, there is no data to _show_ that this is a terrible idea.
Perhaps that's because not many would risk real money on implementing such a
presumably terrible idea.

There are some known cases of drastic redesigns presumably killing a product.
On the other hand, gradual redesigns as well as adding features incrementally
are industry-wide standard practice. That process clearly works. Yes, users
complain about changes. No, they generally won't switch because of them. They
may delay upgrades, but that generally happens with or without changes.

------
bruhmoment
Why do people hate change? Because of BLOAT. No one gives a shit about your
fucking react or electron or node bloat bullshit, give me a fucking simple
site like lazyfoo.net this whole Web 2.0 is so fucked up and inaccessible to
people in 3rd world countries or even just pla es where connectivity is bad.
People care about looks, aesthetic, style. It's all form over function
nowadays. nearly 2 decades ago, Windows XP used less than a 100MB RAM and was
initially buggy shit. Back then, the SP updates FIXED issues; they didn't
CREATE them. I want to go back

------
sizzle
Wow this person is projecting their ignorance of the decades of academic HCI
studies and industry best practices, including UX design and research
methodologies for bringing the user into the design process (to understand
their needs) and uncovering user insights from testing designs early on in the
design process. Would love to see some concrete examples of redesigns that
support the author's argument because I can provide plenty that prove the
opposite which simplified user flows and introduced better conceptual
models/interaction design patterns that were vetted through user testing.

Maybe they've only worked with smaller teams or visual/graphic designers. Any
large organization with a competent UX team can easily dismiss a majority of
their claims by exposing them to the UX design process.

"Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it
more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does X
instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in your
product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do something
in a different product."

Product redesigns should optimize and make product features more
efficient/simple to use for the core audience (user personas [1]) and support
their experience in achieving their end goals (journey mapping [2]).

(Downvoters- would love to hear your perspective)

1\.
[https://www.nngroup.com/videos/personas/](https://www.nngroup.com/videos/personas/)

2\. [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-
mapping/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/)

~~~
gergles
I imagine you’re being downvoted because your post comes across as another
smug designer/product person saying “I know better than you, you uneducated
philistine”, with a side of “you just haven’t seen it done right and your
personal experience is wrong.”

I’m sure Reddit’s abortion of a redesign has went through hundreds of rounds
of UX testing and has been signed off on by the masters of the field, but it’s
still slow, unnecessary, and buggy. It does everything worse than the existing
design, except perhaps for increasing some sort of pointless dashboard metric
users don’t care about.

~~~
sizzle
The author's post came off the same way you've described (to my ears), while
targeting design without any concrete examples so it's all conjecture as far
as I'm concerned. Designers and developers should work closely together, I
depend on them for their technical feasibility/performance subject matter
expertise.

"Reddit redesign [...] it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy."

I agree Reddit's redesign is a mess and it's largely the implementation and
development by the hands of developers whose job it is to code and otherwise
discuss performance tradeoffs with product team/design stakeholders for
exactly all the items you describe.

How are designers to blame for how it was coded? Devs should have voiced
concern if they knew the proposed designs would be a performance disaster on
the publicly facing front-end.

~~~
anaphor
How do you know they didn't?

