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Comment by redstar504 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Google, and many other companies, change things that aren't broken. First they did it with Youtube, and now with their SERPS. Can someone explain the point of that? All it does is piss off users.

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This sort of reminds me of the quote by Henry Ford, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Sure the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" mentality makes a lot of sense, but at the same time if companies aren't innovating, changing things and pushing the limits, we'll never know what else is possible!

Also, if company A doesn't innovate, company B might come up with something better and steal A's customers.

I'm not a big fan of that quote. If you can't read into it and figure out that what your customers actually want is a faster, weather-proofed way of getting around, you have larger problems than "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Using it to justify not listening to customers would make more sense if Henry Ford made his business successful by selling horsewagons.

I happen to think that the new YouTube is much more consistent than the one of the past.

It's consistent, but consistently plastic. I feel like I have no hope of figuring out how the site works except by trial-and-error, because everything looks encapsulated in white plastic that might cover what's just underneath.

My main problem with it is that it's hard to gauge what the community thinks of a video at a glance. Instead of the 5-star system, the likes vs don't-likes are hidden away and you have to find the right button to click to show them.

I see it like this: No single person (or specific group of people) can definitively decide if the old Google design is broken or not (which in this case probably means, being worse or better than the new one). The (arguably!) best measure if the new design is an improvement is how many people perceive it as such. My guess is Google itself has the best understanding if that is the case and wouldn't have changed it if it didn't think it was better (based on the data they gathered).

Exactly. It wouldn't be Google if they hadn't a/b-tested the hell out of this.

And there was me thinking I wonder if Google has done enough. The competition that search is facing now is fierce. Google was in danger of looking tired against other offerings and a user base can turn against a service quickly.

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