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

This was actually not the conclusion I was expecting:<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate.<p>I couldn&#x27;t disagree more strongly. I can&#x27;t think of the last time I encountered a UX change I thought was actually worth it. They&#x27;re always bothersome, because now I <i>notice the tool</i>--it&#x27;s no longer an extension of my mind and body, instead all of a sudden it&#x27;s something getting in the way of my work.<p>I claim there are two reasons UX changes happen:<p>(1) Original design was delivered too hastily and was flawed, requiring breaking changes in the field to fix it.<p>(2) Someone wants to get promoted and thinks the best way to do that is to spin a &quot;UX refresh&quot; as something &quot;successful&quot; rather than the signal of abject failure it actually is. We should stop rewarding this behavior.

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.

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.

I get the point, but doesn&#x27;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 &quot;now with bugs fixed&quot; sticker on it?

There&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s happening under the hood.

Notepad has had some surprising improvements. I&#x27;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&#x27;t sure it was notepad.

&gt; if you dug into Vista, you&#x27;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.<p>The under-the-hood improvements made it very visibly slow... to typical users. The problem wasn&#x27;t their invisibility.

More like, if you ship useless apps, people learn to avoid.<p>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.<p>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.

Also applies to competitors that don&#x27;t look different -- it doesn&#x27;t matter if they have better features under the hood.