
Ask HN: Is it a mistake to design a websites UI without new features - mrburton
Recently someone thanks &quot;Hacker News&quot; for not redesigning their interface and it really made me think: Why do websites redesign a perfectly good interface and not actually add any new features. I&#x27;ve seen this so often in my career and its just baffles me.<p>Unless the interface is terrible or honestly unusable, then there&#x27;s no real good reason to redesign it. Make gradual improvements.<p>Note: I&#x27;m not a UI&#x2F;UX experience, it&#x27;s not my career and if you saw how I dressed on a daily basis, you might want to tell me that my &quot;UI&quot; needs a redesign :)
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y42
On one hand my first guess is: It's just the way it is, because people like
new thinks, same as they hate them. Designs and layouts are improving (or
changing, if you want to name it more neutreal) all the time. Means: A new
"design language" comes up, e.g. the current material design. It looks totally
different to the current design-language.

Depending on the impact of the one who creates this new design language,
eventually it becomes a new standard. Every website (or in general every UI)
not implementing this new design language suddenly looks different. After a
period of time, and after more and more UI's are implementing this new design
language, this difference is simple being perceived as out-dated.

And that's the point when the designer decides to re-build it. And somewhen in
the future, you cannot resist, because all those libraries are based on this
new design.

On the other hand I assume, sometimes new features just requires new designs -
form follows function. A growing page could require a search form or sub-menus
and then you need to think about a re-design.

Summarizing: It's just a matter of time. Try to create and distribute one of
those old MS-DOS apps, those that you are controlling with the keyboard only.
Maybe they would still work in some use cases, but could they provide all the
features the user needs, would they run on a brand new Windows 10-machine or
even a smartphone?

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WheelsAtLarge
I worked with designers that felt it was their job to modify websites not
because it was needed but because they felt that keeping the interface made
the site look old and dated.

I think if the interface works there is no reason to change it but designers
might have a point.

As an example, Yahoo's website manager felt that the site's interface should
change as little as possible so for many many years yahoo's site looked
exactly the same. What ended up happening was that people began to think of
yahoo's website as being old and not as useful as other sites. The interface
was not the cause for yahoo's decline but it did not help that it stayed the
same for so many years.

Much of techs changes are changes for the sake of change not because they are
needed but because without change, we wouldn't know what's helpful vs what's
not.

So, is it a mistake to design a website's UI without new features? I have to
say yes even if I don't like it.

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ToFab123
Sometimes you dont need new features to improve you website. Reorganization of
the content is what is needed. Many choose to redesign the layout to better
facilitate the new structure of the content.

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derrick_jensen
Might be useful for publicity and PR to have one large change and make some
nonsense write up about it (Slack and Evernote did things like this somewhat
recently)

