> 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.
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!