Ah, redesigns, the preserve of the company who has run out of ideas. To be fair, I don't think that what Meta is doing is a redesign but plenty of other companies think that you make something look a bit swisher then everyone will come back.
My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?"
I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.
Had a friend who worked at one of those old internet portals. Their main portal was losing traffic. They wanted to redesign, but any A/B test of UI changes always resulted in faster loss of traffic (because of the "where is that button" effect). Ie people were only clinging to them because they were familiar with the UI and if that changed, they'd just go somewhere else.
The solution? Dozens of incremental changes to get from the old UI to the new one. Need to move a button across the site? Move it 10px at a time over a few weeks/month. Anything faster would just make the iceberg melt faster.
Haha, seems they just had to do that re-design, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember hearing the saying "Programmers are like beavers. Leave a beaver alone to decide what to do and they'll just keep building dams, regardless of the fact that their home is done." I don't know if that's really true about beavers, but it's true about programmers and it's also true about UI designers. If there's no clear direction to take the product, they'll just re-design, refactor, move classes around, change button colors, break things into microservices, rewrite in Rust, re-do the brand design, invent unnecessary custom controls, port it to a Raspberry Pi, add whitespace and 'flat' design, move the search bar to the bottom of the screen, and on and on and on. Programmers gotta program and designers gotta design.
A lot of the reasons companies do redesigns is strategic. When a company first gets successful, it builds for the tastes, preferences, and needs of the userbase at that time. And as it gets more successful, it progressively micro-optimizes for those tastes, so eventually the company and the users that made it successful are tightly intertwined.
For a company to grow, it needs to attract new users. And tastes change, often surprisingly quickly. What was hot for new users in the early 2000s looks incredibly dated now - just check out old.reddit.com or search for [google in 1998] for examples. As someone entering my 40s who was in college or just out of it at the time, those UIs fill me with nostalgia. But someone who's in college now would be like "What is this shit?"
As a side note, this is why HNers are generally terrible at predicting new product trends now, and tend to poo-poo a lot of things that are gaining remarkable traction. Most of us are in our 30s and 40s by now, a time when our habits are basically set and we have neither the time, energy, or social networks to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. To really get a sense of what captures peoples' energy, you need to be one of the people whose energy is captured (or at least watch them closely), which requires the lack of cynicism and judgment that comes with experience.
I'm glad you used old.reddit.com as your example and you also almost nailed my age group (45+). As a user, I'd point to Reddit as the quintessential example of unnecessary change for the sake of change. To my elderly sensibilities, old.reddit.com is better in every single way than the new travesty. Loads faster, less janky, nothing jumping around as content loads, no autoplaying, denser presentation, fills the browser window as I maximize it--by the way this is my #1 bugaboo with "modern" web design: stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser!!! I have a 27" monitor and I want to use the whole thing goddamnit.
So from the point of view of an end user like me, they took something great and ruined everything. I can't imagine that a 25 year old likes the new design better, but then again I can't put myself into the shoes of a 25 year old, so maybe they love jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups begging them to log in or use the app.
I'm sure from the point of view of Reddit however, the new design is awesome in all ways they measure. Probably revenue, "engagement" (ugggghhhh I hate that word), time on site (thanks to infinite scrolling), whatever it is they find important and prioritize. I can tell you they don't prioritize "usable by a 45 year old with disposable income".
On the few occasions I've talked to 20-25 year olds about Reddit and they happen to know about old.reddit.com, they're like "Wow that looks dated. And boring." All the other sites that young people actually use (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) look like the new Reddit version, and these sites are actually getting new users organically. Given that, I think it's fair to say that jank, autoplaying videos, and constant pop-ups are in.
I'll chalk this up to "Kids these days." I'm of similar vintage to you, maybe a few years younger. I don't really like this trend either, and use old.reddit.com when I can.
But you and I don't matter. Our consumption habits are already set, and realistically a start-up (particularly a mass media one) that we don't already patronize isn't going to get them. Businesses battle over the margins, the customers who don't already have buying habits, and fight aggressively to get them.
> stop constraining content to a tiny vertical strip in the center of the damn browser
I had assumed this general tend was to work well on mobile, yet Reddit couldn't do more to make it unbearable to use the website on mobile instead of their app. Constant popups to harass you into using the mobile app
Good design for readability suggest using line lengths which are around 60-70 characters long (at least in print with serif fonts).
My main gripe with narrow columns of content is that they rarely resize properly to smaller desktop sizes (I prefer side-by-side-by-side windows on my large 32" screen, so much that I am considering switching to new 42" oled screens showing up this year — if they were 8k and I had a gpu to drive it, I'd be ecstatic ;)).
I don't want to sound harsh but nobody needs 500 designers or 500 developers (or - pick your favorites) forever unless they have some real work to do that grows the business. The problem is that managers never let go soldiers from their army (let me use this metaphor) because they have to fight other managers to climb the company ladder. This is probably detrimental to the company but it's not what would they care about and it's ok. At best it's a symbiotic relationship in which they can jump host.
With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine. Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore. It might not use SSL so the browser will show ugly warnings or might even stop working completely. Security fixes need to be applied or the website gets hacked. The underlying webserver / platform gets outdated and the provider stops supporting it eventually - or just makes it more expensive. I could go on.
Do you need 500 developers for that? Well, that depends on the size. Maybe, maybe not. But your post gives this vibe of "build it and be done with it" and with software that just doesn't work, even if the business is not growing at all.
>With UI/Design it isn't as bad as with software development in general, but in both cases you need ongoing work or your product gets outdated. Things get deprecated. A website that worked fine many years ago might now not be fine.
What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab.
>Many people use phones and the UI might not fit anymore.
The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone? Those end up being worse e.g. the fixed floating headers/footers that take 60% of the screen in landscape mode when the desktop version was actually usable. (With portrait not being much better.)
> What? I usually see the opposite: it's the super-hip updates that break all the interoperability and standards compliance the site had. My usability add-ons more reliably work on old sites than on the hot new framework that doesn't consistently indicate clickable links or allow you to open views in a new tab.
Not saying anything against that, nor that my example happens often. It should just illustrate a concrete and easy to undertsand example, not necessarily what happens most often.
> The designs that try to overthink whether I'm on a phone?
There were and still are websites like "optimized for IE 800x600". Those might have worked for the majority of their visitors when they were created and maybe that was good enough at the time, even though we both agree that technically it was never great. But it does not work for the majority anymore today and hence might now be considered to need improvements.
Again, maybe not what happens to the majority of websites, but everyone understands the example as a case of "was good enough before, stopped being so because the world moved on".
Either way, it sounds like you're saying sites have all these designers to keep the product from being outdated. If, in practice, they're being made worse, that would strike against claim that all these designers are a benefit and in favor of the claim that they're mostly wasted spending.
I don't think it sounds like it. I agree that many redesigns (maybe even the majority) make things worse for users. It's just that this is a totally different point that does not conflict with "websites, including design, can get outdated over time and then needs someone to fix it to retain the original value".
Omg yes! Thank you for saying this. I cannot agree more. Designs "built for mobile" are the absolute WORST to use on mobile! They break the most basic functionality.
It's not the technologists. It's the market. Humans are well, um, human. Quirky, unpredictable, fickle, etc. A UI / UX that tests well with a dozen or two people might flop once the market gets to it.
And then of course, expectations evolve. It's less churn and simply life and humanity.
I know, we have to run to stay where we are. Nevertheless maintenance is usually less resource intensive than building. It's possible that the new features a company has to add plus maintenance of the existing ones require an ever increasing staff, but not for every single company.
I hate greenfield work until it gets in front of users. By that time it's maintenance...as are new features. I love maintenance because you have a working application (which is the goal) and changes are (or should be) in response to user feedback. "Features" that are derived from internal dialog usually sicken me because they are usually user hostile. Anything that isn't user focused and accessible boils my soul. Churn for user manipulation, and developer induced complexity really piss me off.
My favorite is when we build a decent application and then marketing brings the UX to it's gnees with 27 tracking cookies.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
Users aren't supposed to care about the UI, at all. They're supposed to use it. Feelings about a user interface usually come to the surface when it's confusing, or makes their tasks more difficult to complete.
If you're users never think twice about the design, you've succeeded!
Yup. If I design a UI and you have any feelings about it at all (other than maybe 'oh, I like this font' or 'that's a nice color choice'), I've done it wrong.
Spot on. The UI and UX should be forgettable. Forgettable in the sense that the user should walk away with a feeling of their accomplishment, not how pretty the drop shadows were.
I would add that pushing users to behavior the company wants, but users mostly don't, as a very common reason. Sometimes more profitable features don't get the hoped for amount of traction, or the company wants to push users towards behavior that lets them collect more data or show more ads.
I've seen even stupider reasons too, where a team is sad that some functionality isn't getting used much, so they push for a redesign to shove users into it.
There are valid reasons to redesign an app but I would say that the majority of them are not done for the benefit of the users.
The irony is it's the usability thst sucks, no one realizes or admits it, and the blame gets placed on the design. The redesign comes up short. A head or two rolls. The process continues. Text book insanity.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
IMO people's emotional response to UI is a lot like emotional response to cash as a compensation mechanism. If it's markedly insufficient they're unhappy, but there's a pretty modest cutoff point past which there are rapidly diminishing returns. And it if keeps changing in inconsequential ways they get nervous.
> My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit.
I believe we undervalue how much UI will get people in the door and overvalue how much it will keep them there. When a user is seeking novelty, design is a huge component of that. When they are seeking familiarity, any change is an anti-feature.
You pick a new restaurant based on the originality of its menu. You keep going because you fall in love with a couple of items on it. You stop going when they change things up and discard your favorite dish.
My experience is that people care less about UI than most designers would like to admit. Of course, nice UI is nice but people would rather achieve a task for a cost and UI is just icing. Even worse is when you change the UI/UX, people get really annoyed at that! "Where is that button I always used to click to do X?" "Oh, you don't do it that way anymore! You need to relearn what you have spent the last 5 years assigning to muscle memory but hey, the site looks cooler right?"
I mean what else would you expect if you employ 500 designers? They have to do something.