Recently someone thanks "Hacker News" 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've seen this so often in my career and its just baffles me.<p>Unless the interface is terrible or honestly unusable, then there's no real good reason to redesign it. Make gradual improvements.<p>Note: I'm not a UI/UX experience, it's not my career and if you saw how I dressed on a daily basis, you might want to tell me that my "UI" needs a redesign :)
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>I think if the interface works there is no reason to change it but designers might have a point.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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)