No, UI redesigns are a waste of time <i>for the user</i>.<p>They are very effective at getting the executives who sponsor them promoted, because they look great in a PowerPoint. The actual customer of an executive is the finance department, because they are the ones who actually control the headcount & budgets that an executive needs, and they are usually not the user. How the product <i>works</i> is often invisible to someone who is not a daily user, and financial analysts often don't have time to be power users in all the products they are evaluating. How it <i>looks</i> is very visible. Therefore, when deciding which projects to fund, they are often biased toward shiny.<p>Notice that founder-run companies, and ones that are too small to have normal corporate functional separation, usually don't invest in visual redesigns unless the existing UI is <i>really</i> bad. Big corporations do it continuously.
As a counterpoint, when you change the insides, no one notices: <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39193" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...</a><p>>And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. “Look at Calc, same as it always was.”
Reddit comes to mind. Who knows how much money they spent on their redesign with users hating it and actively choosing to use their old site design YEARS after they rolled out their new design.<p>I also run a site and when I ask people what I should improve next, nearly no one says design, even when the design is clearly not very good.<p>An example of a site that never changes is Craigslist. I can't even recall the last time it looked different. It's probably overdue for a redesign even.
This is a mostly fair and accurate take, but there is an element of cherry picking here. There are countless UI updates that you don’t notice or barely notice. When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.
Though there are sometimes good reasons to do so, company brand (logo, typography, name, etc.) refreshes often come across as an employment program for designers. There are legit reasons--e.g. working better on mobile or reflecting that a company doesn't do what it used to do any longer. But I see the sort of redesign where a company subtly adjusted the hue of its logo and I'm like "Why?"
My take is that this happens because the industry at large, especially web, does not treat engineers as proper engineers, and instead makes engineers do all sorts of other work. This leads to the type of engineering work that accumulates a lot of damage relatively quickly and needs to be rewritten over and over again.<p>The ideal engineering solution, even for UIs, should be something that is abstracted properly, written only once, and then accumulates new features without any friction whatsoever. The new features rest on top of the platform seamlessly, giving users more options with no downsides.<p>A good UI, imho, is one that users can configure, it only adds new things and never take out existing features, and is robust, reliable and responsive. This is a serious technical challenge and most organizations are not setup in a way to solve this problem properly without the solution deteriorating and needing a rewrite... and yes in part it's because on the business side there is no perceptin that this is actually needed and so it is deemed easier to just rewrite and build something new every time.
> Do we have concrete evidence that what we are doing will provide benefit to the company or users, or just feel that it would be better if the UI was redesigned?<p>This isn't specific to UI redesigns, or even to software in general. People have been doing things "just because" since before the discovery of fire.
Very often it just seems to be a rat race to have the most "trendy" UI. I'm not sure how it works internally, but trends change all the time and I think it would be in the best interest of a company like Google or Meta to have a "modern" style.
We really have two sorts of software: the immutable types that developers depend on to behave exactly as they did forty years ago, and then the slop relegated to the general public that seems to need a redesign every 5 years, much like the inside of a grocery store.
Is it bad that I almost feel nostalgia at those old spambots in the comments? Ironically it's one of the few types of posts i don't think you could get an LLM to output.
Getting a new car with a new design is a waste of time and resources. What is new after all? You have all you need. A box with engine, wheels and steering wheel.<p>I am curious, what car model and from what year this gentleman uses? I hope everything around him is only made by following his advice and principle.<p>There is a problem in UX/UI design. Twofold problem.<p>Developers hate to work on frontend implementation, and designers have mediocre knowledge about their craft and refuse to think objectively.<p>Both of the problems can be solved with actual effort in education.<p>Instead, big corps are wasting money and energy to replace all of them. AI will solve all of this by removing capitalism, human expertise, and design. Right?<p>Sidenote. Today, I have tried seven times to update my Mac Mini. After hours of fight with Apple logic, I give up.
What's going on there?
Can anyone here explain why YouTube (namely the mobile interface) goes through a total redesign every 1-2 years? Is it just to earn some unknown manager another promotion? I'm getting really sick of it at this point.
People like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.