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Comment by wycy | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users. Every single change to the Facebook UI/UX, every single change to Windows UI/UX, is met with an enormous backlash from users--"I just want it to look and work like it used to!" Then the next redesign comes around, and lo and behold, now people are attached to the current design that they previously hated, and now hate the new design. Tale as old as time.

I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

However, there have been 2 redesigns that even I didn't like: the Digg redesign, and this Reddit redesign. Both are objectively bad. We know what happened because of the former. It remains to be seen what will happen due to the latter.

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> I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users.

I think this is only partly true.

Most of the time new designs come with a few side effects like being really slow or buggy, but then over time those things get ironed out.

For example, the new gmail UI is a nice improvement but it's buggy. Clicking into an email won't flag it as read if you leave the email quickly so you end up with a bunch of unread emails that you actually read which in turn makes me hate the new UI due to a bug. I'm concerned because this was around way back when they announced the opt in beta and it's still not fixed after forcing it on users.

A redesign of a system you use regularly and have some sort of personal attachment to is like someone sneaking into your house at night and rearranging the furniture.

I work for a major UK community site and we get a furious backlash against even the slightest of changes. And sometimes against things that users think have changed but actually haven't.

(Very) generally we as humans hate having to think. Figuring out a change to something we use regularly means all our automatic shortcuts no longer work and we have to start paying attention.

It's like how annoying it is when they keep moving stuff round in the supermarket but *100 worse.

Yes, but nobody would want to go back to Windows 3.1 now, and new users get put off by old-looking pages. There can be real advantages to those redesigns.

There are good and bad redesigns and there's hyperbole. Most of Windows/Facebook/iOS outcries are hyperbole. Reddit's new design is just bad. For a good example of a slick modern redesign look at new Gmail.

Right, agreed, the Reddit redesign is just bad. But the fact that probably 99+% of any UI/UX changes result in an uproarious outcry from users, even when it's not bad, probably results in these outcries simply being ignored.

>I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

Same. And I still hate the new Reddit. Not because of the new design but because of how slow it is and because they have shifted CPU usage from their servers to my computer.

Yeah, the new reddit is just objectively bad. It frequently fails to load content for me at all. Terrible user experience.

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