How dare I polish and remove kludges from previous releases. 😆
Also, none of those kludges would have even been necessary if the project scope was properly defined from the start and the project manager didn’t let the users keep trickling in new requirements without also extending the deadline.
So yeah, how dare I go back and implement something the way it should have been done the first time?
The trouble is that, apparently, “perfect UI” can mean “let’s take all the sidebar tabs, remove their text labels and make all their icons really abstract and in the same colour. Oh, and change their order, too, while you’re at it.”
Thank you from the bottom of my muscle memory and pattern recognition. Now, give us back our old UI that was actually meaningful, or at least make it an option if you insist that your “clean look” is more important than actual usability.
^(Apart from that, I love you JetBrains.)
Really true. I hope “new UI” stays optional until I retire or become a potato farmer. I haven’t worked long enough at Microsoft to deserve geese.
I admire your logic and life plan.
But, “deserve … geese”? Need more data.
A reference to the software engineer who worked 20+ years at Microsoft and then became a goose farmer. The LinkedIn post became viral.
There is a dangerously large population of devs and managers that look at themselves, unironically, as the gigachads pumping out ui “upgrades”
Many of these fail to realize how disruptive it is. UI change is like API breakage for the brain.
I have lost track of how many times I’ve tried to help an elderly family member with an app after some pointless, trivial, ui change. Only ending with them entirely giving up on using the app after the “upgrade” because the cognitive overhead of the change is beyond the skill that can fairly be expected for them 💔
This is such a masterpiece from xkcd
There’s always a relevant xkcd. Lol
I still can’t do half the stuff in the windows settings app that I could in the control panel, and every update removes an option in control panel without an adequate replacement.
Inb4 “use Linux” I DO but Nvidia and Wayland is still BORKED (even with v555) and when I’m done with work I just want to load up a game and not have to fuck with drivers and never actually play. Sue me.
Nvidia and Wayland is still BORKED
Nope
I’m 100% linux, even on my work PC, but I will spare you the evangelism. lol
It’s pretty safe to look at Microsoft as a shining beacon of what not to do when it comes to (re) design. I’m not an Apple fan, but I do respect that OSX has basically just had incremental / evolutional UI changes since it was first released. Any major differences (AFAIK, anyway) were slowly and progressively implemented over several versions.
I was an Apple fan for most of my life. And then Jobs died. The man was a huge asshole by all accounts but he sure knew how to design. Since then Apple has become just another tech giant making average products driven by business majors.
Jobs was our asshole. New version of OS X would have issues and they’d fix stuff through point releases and things I noticed, he also noticed.
I’m not convinced that Cook knows how to use a computer. And he certainly didn’t know how to deal with Ive, which boils down to knowing software vs hardware.
I’m about ready to rehome my RTX 2080 and get an AMD card so I don’t have to deal with Nvidia’s proprietary garbage or the shit-tier open source drivers.
My RTX 2080 works perfectly fine with nvidia’s drivers on x11.
I have no issue with their drivers working with their cards. I have issues using a proprietary, out of tree driver that taints my kernel and forces me to jump through hoops to get it to work whenever I recompile my kernel, which happens maybe once a month when Gentoo’s kernel source package is updated.
Also I use Wayland (because that’s what KDE defaults to).
What’s wrong with X11?
About a year ago I tried switching to Linux and used Linux Mint exclusively for about a month and a half.
I have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, one 144hz and a 60hz monitor. The problem is that the compositor runs at the lower of the two, for both monitors. In theory it should be possible for a full screen app like a game to bypass the compositor completely, but I could never get that to actually work, games running in both exclusive full screen and borderless were kneecapped to 60hz video output because I had the audacity to have a secondary monitor connected. But even if that did work correctly, regular desktop use would still be kneecapped. Admittedly not as important, but still annoying. I ended up having to use a hacky config tweak to force the compositor to run at 144hz, which worked but also caused tearing on my secondary monitor.
On top of that, X11 straight up does not support VRR / G-sync if you have more than one monitor. And HDR? Completely unsupported.
Same boat brother … don’t let the hivemind bother you. I deal with an oracle linix at work for 8h a day, when I get home I don’t want to spend time fixing my own shit … even if it’s going to be better in the long run.
I’ll switch to Mint the second ricochet anti cheat has native proton support …
Nice try Microsoft, I still don’t like your monthly “small” ui changes that hide the features I use and add extra “get copilot now” buttons
Nice try Microsoft
That’s the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me. 😆
My bad, what linux distro you running?
Debian 🤘
Eyyyy, I’m on Mint!
Debian Stable?
Yep, though “Debian Stable” is a bit redundant lol.
What’s with Debian Sid?
Its for testing
They even put a “Github CoPilot” button to Visual Studio FFS. Fortunately they at least added an option in the config, which unlike most UI elements in VS requires a restart. But at least it can be removed I guess.
Didn’t think MS would enshittify VS because “Developers! Developers! Developers!” but here we are.
This is what I imagine the Reddit developers think of themselves as. 😆
Ouch! 😆
Yeah, I’m sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface “update” that you’ve ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer’s position in this meme.
Oh for sure.
The meme is just a very exaggerated tale of moving a tacked-on, added-at-the-absolute-last second button from the previous release into the action menu where it should have gone originally. It’s an in-house application, and the people that complained are also the type that will bold an entire page because “it’s important”. lol
In all my life I’ve only experienced one UI overhaul that I considered an improvement, and even then there were a few specific features that were a step backwards, even by proper design standards (the same action did two different things in only slightly different scenarios.)
Buuiuuuut I know half the time it’s just because I’m used to the old way, only the other half is it some corporate bullshit trying to push a feature no one asked for.
Yeah, I get that completely. Which is why I rarely, if ever, overhaul the whole interface.
Pretty much every change is a refinement rather than a complete redesign. In this case, the complaint was because I moved a button that was just kind of tacked-on last minute in a previous release into the action menu where it should have gone to start with. lol
So. How long have you worked for Google? Not in years; in chat apps.
What’s the difference?
A year lasts longer
Yeah, what you have to remember is that most users are pretty dumb. They don’t know how the software works, just where the buttons are to do the thing they want to do. They don’t read anything or learn anything other than what is needed for some menial task, and that they’re only employed because the company they work for is too small for it to be automated.
If your stuff is free then do what you want, but the second you start charging money for stuff, you have to be acutely aware that the change that makes sense and makes everything neater and cleaner is going to make some 65 year old in an office freak the fuck out because now they can’t do their job because their buttons have moved or the icon has changed.
Automating menial tasks is literally what computers are for.
Hrm, I would argue that if your update gets in the way of productivity on the user side, then it’s actually worse, not better.
Sure, in a vacuum it might be superior, but that is now what is happening.
We used to rail against our users always wanting an Excel like view for everything, but when you observe them working to understand their work flow it makes sense. They use excel the other 75%of the day, we’re the one breaking their mental flow and ruining their productivity.
Just because someone got used to walking around on their knuckles doesn’t mean walking upright isn’t easier and better overall. Sure, it will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, and they’ll have to get used to it before they see any improvement, but once they get past those hurdles even they will be amazed at how fast walking upright can be. And in the meantime, no one else who already has a tendency to walk upright will have to go through the pain and inefficiency of walking on their knuckles.
Some people don’t have time to learn new workflows at their job. Their workload is maxed out with the workflow they currently have and while their boss may understand they need time to learn a new workflow, the bean counters up the chain won’t. Maybe their replacements will get trained on the changes you made but the current ones are fucked.
These people don’t get to pick whether they use Excel, either. They have to, they just want to get their job done and go home, too.
They don’t get paid to walk upright, basically. So why do it just so someone else can buy another yacht?
You seem very defensive of the workers. That’s cool, I’m one of them.
Good workers will do better with the right tool. Bad workers, those who are resistant to change and are unwilling to learn, will never do better. So why cater to the bad workers? Now catering to the bad workers makes sense if the job is so basic that virtually no training is required, and bad workers need to eat, too. But saying we should all crawl because they don’t want to run is absurd.
Software developers are uniquely arrogant in their belief that they have a right to choose when the workers of entire industries or sometimes everyone in the world needs to re-train on the tools they use to do their jobs.
I’m a woodworker. Imagine if I walked into the shop one day to find my table saw replaced with one of those mutant sliding table European things because the manufacturer pushed an update. “We’ve replaced your tool with one that conforms to recently adopted industry norms, buzzwords and trendy design patterns we in the table saw industry have been peer pressuring each other into adopting. You may proceed to suckle upon our genitals in gratitude and worship.”
Meanwhile I’m losing money because the tool I rely on to run my business no longer functions how I was trained to use it. I have to tell my customers that their orders aren’t getting filled because I was visited by the saw fairy and instead of building their furniture for them I have to read manuals, learn how to safely use this thing, find where all the controls went, and then remake all the jigs and tooling I relied on for production and hopefully I can get back to doing actual work before they change it again according to their needs and not mine, on their schedule and not mine.
That’s what it’s like using software in the age of nightly updates or worse cloud-based solutions. You never know when your tools will change out from under you mid-project.
This is true. However, changes aren’t always bad. Messing up keybindings and just moving around stuff just so that it looks “cleaner” is the absolutely worst thing to do. If you decide to completely redesign your UI you should at least give Users the Opportunity to still use the old UI. This way new Users can start working with your new UI and the rest can, if they want, learn the new UI.
This is especially the Case when you redesign your UI in a way so that its more Intuitive to new Users.
The other response said it well enough, but I’ll go a step further.
MS made a tradition of moving functionality around in their OS for no other reason that I could glean than grouping things in an at least superficially comparable group and absolutely not where it was in the last version, merely so that certification from the previous version wouldn’t apply to the current one. They would do similar things with their Office application menus, in one version moving them around based on how often you used them (try doing phone support with that!), in another replacing them with little pictures that pretended they were related to their functionality, and again moving them around every version apparently for the sake of requiring recertification.
To top it all off, they would also not give you access to the old menuing systems. You could argue bloat, but that would be ignoring the massive piles of it they added for the sake of animating their new menus alone (which has value, to a degree).
I’m aware of some of the interesting bits of woodworking, as well. I can imagine the response if you told woodworkers that the only hammer/mallet they could use was a 16 oz claw hammer. And the reason we made all those different hammers is because they are the best option for the task they were designed for. You can get away with using a smaller set, especially if your workflow would require using some rarely enough that it isn’t worth adding in their storage and cost to be worth it, but a good woodworker will still be aware of those tools and be assessing their processes to determine if it’s time to expand their toolset.
And the difference between the physical world and the world of computer interfaces is you aren’t limited to just one. The open source world is particularly fond of including deprecated functionality because there are a lot of pieces working together and it will often take years to get everything updated, and you will never know when the last dependency is removed. Likewise with UIs. A lot of the time, a deprecated one can be kept around for those who can’t be bothered to learn the new one, but the cost of keeping the old version around for a few years is usually relatively low (and the developer can determine how much they are willing to have that cost be and do things to help make it stay within that limit). That’s no reason to leave the old version as the default, though.
It is if you don’t get pay to run, getting anywhere faster doesn’t help you at all, and it costs more energy. And you gain nothing from it. That’s my point.
And that’s why you don’t have a 6 month sprint…
Yeah holy shit! I hope this is a made up example. A six month sprint where you change literally everything about your UI? No wonder customers are upset!
I’ve previously worked at a company that did that lol, but they had a toggle to turn it back to the old UI, and everyone kept switching back to using the old UI, including new customers.
To be fair the old UI was looking really dated, and needed a refresh, but it was functional and didn’t really need a complete overhaul, should’ve just updated the style.
Reddit, is that you?
Nah this was niche enterprise software.
Not if the new UI consists of a single
closebutton: “make whatever I want”
the user is always right
Yep, lol.
- The user is always right
- The user has no fucking clue what they want
I hate how both of those things are true at the same time 😆
It isn’t always that they don’t know what they want, sometimes they just don’t know how to describe what they want, or they may know what they don’t want.
This may shock and amaze you but…
there is more than one user for your product. If you don’t know that, it sounds like you either haven’t done a user survey or you haven’t created the correct user profiles (based on that survey).
Creating a “perfect UI” without asking users what they want is not good UX. It’s just masturbation. The user survey tells you that people want A B C, etc. and in which order. You should know exactly how your changes are going to be received when you release them.
Imagine a restaurant that doesn’t ask you what you want. Instead the chef tells you “This is the best food possible” and just makes what they want. That’s what developing without a user survey is like.
You’re taking this far too literally. There’s a good bit of hyperbole in play here for the purposes of making a joke.
Next you’ll be telling me that’s not you in the picture!
Imagine you’re the chef at a restaurant and the guest tells you they want the fluffiest pancace possible, positioned vertically on the plate. In fact, they want three of them, stacked on each others’ rims. And vegan with extra eggs.
And when you finally serve that aneurysm of a dish, they tell you that in their dialect, ‘pancake’ actually means ‘lasagna’.
Hopefully the pancake/lasagna garbage could be caught by sharing some wireframes early on?
(Is this unrealistic?)
the guest tells you they want the fluffiest pancace possible, positioned vertically on the plate.
In fact they want four of them, each perpendicular to all othes
Imagine a restaurant that doesn’t ask you what you want. Instead the chef tells you “This is the best food possible” and just makes what they want.
that is exactly how restaurants work. have you ever been to one? you are offered a choice of meals they designed and if you don’t like it, well, there is about billion other restaurants you may try, they are not going to start crafting custom meal for you.
You can’t be saying fire the private chef - that’s OP!
I sympathize btw, I sympathize
The user is always right about what they are willing to spend money on. That doesn’t mean they know what they want, although a lot of people don’t want to change.
That doesn’t mean all change is good, and it isn’t like any UI will ever meet everyone’s preferences. For example, I hate adaptive design interfaces that are significantly different in confusing ways on different resolutions. Like I understand switching a static menu to an expandable menu, but not moving the relative location of certain buttons from the bottom of the screen to the top or vise versa. But that might make sense for some use case that isn’t how I interact with it.
The user will forget about the old UI after 2 weeks.
I still constantly bitch about not being able to pin the taskbar to the side of the screen in windows 11.
There will always be some static-friction to UI changes, even if it’s a change that makes the UI more accessible overall. Everytime you alter your UI you’re taxing your users as it will take them some time to adapt to the new system. You should minimize how often you do this for that reason. Additionally, sometimes you may be unaware of an unintentional feature users appreciate that you’re depreciating.
I dislike your comment because it’s making a lot of sweeping generalizations (like that the UI changes are actually good) and ignoring the fact that users may have legitimate complaints.
Exactly. When discord updated their mobile UI everyone immediately hated it cuz different. There were legitimately some poor decisions made, but then they went and reverted like half of it after people had started to get used to it. For example, I got used to and liked where they moved dms to and they reverted it back, but kept having to tap on the name of a channel to view the users in it instead of just swiping left.
Edit: and I’m also now used to the bad things they kept.
If this were true we would still be riding horses.
That’s a stupid bug report!
For once, a username really checks out.
😆
Sometimes this is true, but sometimes UI updates really are just bad. Euro Truck Simulator 2 redid its UI in 1.50 and it’s so much harder to use. Everything used to just be convenient buttons and information on the main menu, now everything is in really confusing menus and even though it’s been out for a few months now I still have so much trouble using it and it feels so good to go back to an older version with a good UI. (Also the new UI is just horrendously ugly because they made everything completely flat but that’s just personal taste I guess)
