5 ms·

If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)

56 points by michelangelo 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
politelemon 2y ago
Notepad 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.
- eterm 2y ago
  I remember when Ctrl+S in notepad didn't save, that one took a surprisingly long time to arrive.
  - goodSteveramos 2y ago
    When was that fixed?
    - eterm 2y ago
      Windows XP I think, maybe windows 2000
  - awelxtr 2y ago
    In Spanish doesn't, and it never did. However I remember hitting Ctrl+G to save often
- xerox13ster 2y ago
  OTOH with these changes, the new UX of being able to recover unsaved documents made it so that Windows sees no problem with restarting or shutting down on me without my approval even if I have a notepad open. This breaks my historic workflow of keeping an unsaved notepad open so that if it was detected it wouldn't force close other processes with unsaved work and I could save them or rely on my PC to stay awake and running some long-running process overnight. The first time I woke up to a restarted PC with my place lost bc of this, I realized that Windows' days were numbered on my hardware.
erehweb 2y ago
I 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?
- water-your-self 2y ago
  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.
DDayMace 2y ago
There'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.
- rendaw 2y ago
  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.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Large established companies cannot meaningfully change their UI without alienating all of their legacy customers.
  - DDayMace 2y ago
    It seems like if the company did a bunch of A/B testing on a wide range of customers, they could figure out if such legacy customers were truly satisfied with the existing product, or perhaps prefer the new UI.
- gedy 2y ago
  Strategy I've taken in some places is: do not loop in UX or advertise this is a big rewrite. UX, PMs, and some engineers just cannot resist the opportunity to change the UI around and your important tech debt works gets blamed for the rest of the org's fiddling.
  - DDayMace 2y ago
    Yes, that's a good strategy. Ask for permission rather than forgiveness. A former colleague and I did just that for awhile, and we were able to avoid the politics and fit the work into sprints.
fbdab103 2y ago
This 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.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
Also applies to competitors that don't look different -- it doesn't matter if they have better features under the hood.
binarymax 2y ago
There’s a flip side to this. If you change the UI for no reason, people get upset. For example, the latest iOS update flipped the speaker and mute buttons during a call. Why? No improvement was made, it’s just frustrating.
- zootboy 2y ago
  I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. Even if you believe you have a functional reason, you had better think really long and hard about whether the supposed improvement you want is worth the pain of every single user needing to adapt to that change.
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    Disagree. It's a lot more involved than that.
    - coldtea 2y ago
      What is more involved?
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. On the flip side, who do get to be promoted.
  - pizzafeelsright 2y ago
    You're telling me you released a product that was so incomplete and it requires weekly updates?
- windows2020 2y ago
  The next Windows version should be called Windows Legacy. Remove all the objectively (from the perspective of a non-oblivious user) stupid stuff that 10 and 11 added including half-baked UIs, extra clicks, inconsistencies, random forced changes, 'AI', etc. How many of us have encountered 'Legacy' systems that get a bad wrap but are actually responsible for everything? Eventually Legacy will have a positive connotation. So let's get to that now and resume improving the internals unless there's actually something else to do. And for those who bring up being afraid of change I propose Windows Random Change edition for you.
wruza 2y ago
More like, if you ship useless apps, people learn to avoid. Notepad2 is an amazing drop-in replacement with a perfect balance between features and simplicity. That’s what Notepad should have been since forever. Microsoft should buy it and study how to make basic apps. Last time I’ve used notepad it still couldn’t tab things. When it’s so bad, there’s no chance I will “notice” anything later. You lost a user of a free mandatory default app, congrats.
- Chiron1991 2y ago
  Notepad on Windows 11 is decent. Replaced my need for Sublime Text.
jcgrillo 2y ago
This was actually not the conclusion I was expecting: > Don't bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate. I couldn't disagree more strongly. I can't think of the last time I encountered a UX change I thought was actually worth it. They're always bothersome, because now I notice the tool--it's no longer an extension of my mind and body, instead all of a sudden it's something getting in the way of my work. I claim there are two reasons UX changes happen: (1) Original design was delivered too hastily and was flawed, requiring breaking changes in the field to fix it. (2) Someone wants to get promoted and thinks the best way to do that is to spin a "UX refresh" as something "successful" rather than the signal of abject failure it actually is. We should stop rewarding this behavior.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  I can tell you from personal experience on a UX team why it happens: The UI is designed for features A, B, and C. We design, test, revise design, test, and so on. There’s more thought and rigor that goes into than you might be thinking. Hurray, product launches, it looks good, and most importantly it works and users are successfully completing their tasks. Now what? Well at the company town hall meeting the CEO announces features D, E, and F. Oh, there was a team already working on these features in isolation and the workflow is set in stone because they already built the back-end services and APIs. Ok, now we need to design UI for these features and cram them alongside A, B, and C. If we were smart we designed the UI in such a way that it can accommodate new stuff, because we always know there’s new stuff coming down the line. It fits, but now the UI is getting a bit bloated. Now here comes new features G, H, and I. Oh, by the way feature H is similar to E, but it works totally differently. They kind of fill the same role, so we need to make sure users aren’t confused by it. No, we can’t merge them because E is owned by product but H is the CMO’s initiative. Cram more stuff in. Now it’s starting to get confusing, and the design that made sense for A, B, C, D, E, and F doesn’t really work with I because feature I does something that current user’s don’t really need, it’s meant to grow our market share. Rinse and repeat until the only thing left to do is nuke it all from orbit and repeat the cycle. In my experience it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional product culture, not overzealous UX designers. We’d rather not design new UIs for the same product constantly and do “refreshes”, we’d rather be fixing all the unglamorous problems in existing UI that frustrates users or get to the backlog of WCAG violations that no one seems to care about.
dataflow 2y ago
> if you dug into Vista, you'd find quite a few substantive technical improvements over the now-ancient Windows XP. But many of those improvements were under the hood, and thus invisible to the typical user. The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.

56 points by michelangelo 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Notepad 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.

eterm 2y ago
I remember when Ctrl+S in notepad didn't save, that one took a surprisingly long time to arrive.
- goodSteveramos 2y ago
  When was that fixed?
  - eterm 2y ago
    Windows XP I think, maybe windows 2000
- awelxtr 2y ago
  In Spanish doesn't, and it never did. However I remember hitting Ctrl+G to save often
xerox13ster 2y ago
OTOH with these changes, the new UX of being able to recover unsaved documents made it so that Windows sees no problem with restarting or shutting down on me without my approval even if I have a notepad open. This breaks my historic workflow of keeping an unsaved notepad open so that if it was detected it wouldn't force close other processes with unsaved work and I could save them or rely on my PC to stay awake and running some long-running process overnight. The first time I woke up to a restarted PC with my place lost bc of this, I realized that Windows' days were numbered on my hardware.

erehweb 2y ago

I 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?

water-your-self 2y ago
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.

DDayMace 2y ago

There'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.

rendaw 2y ago
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.
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
Large established companies cannot meaningfully change their UI without alienating all of their legacy customers.
- DDayMace 2y ago
  It seems like if the company did a bunch of A/B testing on a wide range of customers, they could figure out if such legacy customers were truly satisfied with the existing product, or perhaps prefer the new UI.
gedy 2y ago
Strategy I've taken in some places is: do not loop in UX or advertise this is a big rewrite. UX, PMs, and some engineers just cannot resist the opportunity to change the UI around and your important tech debt works gets blamed for the rest of the org's fiddling.
- DDayMace 2y ago
  Yes, that's a good strategy. Ask for permission rather than forgiveness. A former colleague and I did just that for awhile, and we were able to avoid the politics and fit the work into sprints.

fbdab103 2y ago

This 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.

amadeuspagel 2y ago

Also applies to competitors that don't look different -- it doesn't matter if they have better features under the hood.

binarymax 2y ago

There’s a flip side to this. If you change the UI for no reason, people get upset. For example, the latest iOS update flipped the speaker and mute buttons during a call. Why? No improvement was made, it’s just frustrating.

zootboy 2y ago
I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. Even if you believe you have a functional reason, you had better think really long and hard about whether the supposed improvement you want is worth the pain of every single user needing to adapt to that change.
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  Disagree. It's a lot more involved than that.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    What is more involved?
- coldtea 2y ago
  >I'd go a step further: if you change the UI for no functional reason, you are a bad person who is causing needless consternation, confusion, and productivity loss. On the flip side, who do get to be promoted.
- pizzafeelsright 2y ago
  You're telling me you released a product that was so incomplete and it requires weekly updates?
windows2020 2y ago
The next Windows version should be called Windows Legacy. Remove all the objectively (from the perspective of a non-oblivious user) stupid stuff that 10 and 11 added including half-baked UIs, extra clicks, inconsistencies, random forced changes, 'AI', etc. How many of us have encountered 'Legacy' systems that get a bad wrap but are actually responsible for everything? Eventually Legacy will have a positive connotation. So let's get to that now and resume improving the internals unless there's actually something else to do. And for those who bring up being afraid of change I propose Windows Random Change edition for you.

wruza 2y ago

More like, if you ship useless apps, people learn to avoid. Notepad2 is an amazing drop-in replacement with a perfect balance between features and simplicity. That’s what Notepad should have been since forever. Microsoft should buy it and study how to make basic apps. Last time I’ve used notepad it still couldn’t tab things. When it’s so bad, there’s no chance I will “notice” anything later. You lost a user of a free mandatory default app, congrats.

Chiron1991 2y ago
Notepad on Windows 11 is decent. Replaced my need for Sublime Text.

jcgrillo 2y ago

This was actually not the conclusion I was expecting: > Don't bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate. I couldn't disagree more strongly. I can't think of the last time I encountered a UX change I thought was actually worth it. They're always bothersome, because now I notice the tool--it's no longer an extension of my mind and body, instead all of a sudden it's something getting in the way of my work. I claim there are two reasons UX changes happen: (1) Original design was delivered too hastily and was flawed, requiring breaking changes in the field to fix it. (2) Someone wants to get promoted and thinks the best way to do that is to spin a "UX refresh" as something "successful" rather than the signal of abject failure it actually is. We should stop rewarding this behavior.

nkrisc 2y ago
I can tell you from personal experience on a UX team why it happens: The UI is designed for features A, B, and C. We design, test, revise design, test, and so on. There’s more thought and rigor that goes into than you might be thinking. Hurray, product launches, it looks good, and most importantly it works and users are successfully completing their tasks. Now what? Well at the company town hall meeting the CEO announces features D, E, and F. Oh, there was a team already working on these features in isolation and the workflow is set in stone because they already built the back-end services and APIs. Ok, now we need to design UI for these features and cram them alongside A, B, and C. If we were smart we designed the UI in such a way that it can accommodate new stuff, because we always know there’s new stuff coming down the line. It fits, but now the UI is getting a bit bloated. Now here comes new features G, H, and I. Oh, by the way feature H is similar to E, but it works totally differently. They kind of fill the same role, so we need to make sure users aren’t confused by it. No, we can’t merge them because E is owned by product but H is the CMO’s initiative. Cram more stuff in. Now it’s starting to get confusing, and the design that made sense for A, B, C, D, E, and F doesn’t really work with I because feature I does something that current user’s don’t really need, it’s meant to grow our market share. Rinse and repeat until the only thing left to do is nuke it all from orbit and repeat the cycle. In my experience it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional product culture, not overzealous UX designers. We’d rather not design new UIs for the same product constantly and do “refreshes”, we’d rather be fixing all the unglamorous problems in existing UI that frustrates users or get to the backlog of WCAG violations that no one seems to care about.

dataflow 2y ago

> if you dug into Vista, you'd find quite a few substantive technical improvements over the now-ancient Windows XP. But many of those improvements were under the hood, and thus invisible to the typical user. The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn't their invisibility.