In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.
I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.
Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do.
I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off.
The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions.
Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.
For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site.
For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.
I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.
Craig's List looks dated, but remains incredibly functional and is still the top site in its segment. Its dated look doesn't scare people away. It is still very functional. That's the important part.
Yet Craigslist appears to be steadily losing traffic each and every year since 2017, so I’m not sure it’s the best example.
Meanwhile Facebook marketplace is nipping at their feet while they are staying static.
Clearly Craigslist is incredibly profitable and successful, and possibly more profitable in the short term because they aren’t investing, but IMO remaining static means you lose ground eventually.
I think that fatigue of seeing the same design is real. But I also think that for the most part, company employees, executives are the only people who see the sites frequently enough for it to be a problem.
I’ve absolutely sat in RFP processes where a product is discounted because it ‘feels old and legacy’, so you are absolutely right that there is value in the emotional feel of a product.
There is definitely a perception that if the front end of the product is old and hasn’t had a refresh, that it’s probably the same with the rest of the product and it’s sitting in maintenance mode.
Major redesigns to marketing pieces (aka, advertisements) are fine. No one spends a long time staring at them anyway.
Major redesigns to tools will annoy the hell out of their users, unless things are done very carefully indeed (or the old tool was indisputably awful). You've got to look at how novices onboard to and use them, how intermediate users use them, how experts use them, and, if you can find one, how a master uses the tool. (The master will probably do something that surprises you. Make sure your redesign does not piss the master off, unless you like firefighting.) That's a lot of work!
Unfortunately, most things in life are tools by this definition, or at least close enough to them.
But a lot of non techy users get confused very quickly. My family members, and not just older ones, are constantly having problems with app's changing things around, smart smart TV moving things around, apps changing icons etc.
I am usually their first call and I can tell you, that a lot redesigns, even when they are clearly better designs, leave a lot of users confused.
And it annoys me because not only are they usually annoyed when they call, but somehow its my problem. There is a reason why I am on backend. I don't like dealing with users.
Not that different from some rewriting, refactoring or moving to $TECHNOLOGY I saw in the last 20 years of my career. Probably minus the travel/food...err no, I forget the mandatory conferences to understand better the new tech and know how other companies use it!
It's similar to how some development choices are made too. Examples: Rewriting the system in a new language, change a framework or create your own from scratch.
I have fallen into that trap myself. I have read about some exciting new tech in a blog and want to try it out in a POC. There may be some excitement around it and suddenly it becomes a MVP and placed into production. Eventually it evolves into "legacy code" that developers hate to touch. The right approach is sometimes to step back, and rewrite the POC in a language/framework that can be supported by others.
As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries.
Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.
This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.
I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.
