Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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I've noticed that it's a commonly accepted fact in most other areas of software development that mass rewriting of large and extensively-used pieces of code is a bad idea precisely because it'll probably introduce plenty of new bugs that were either never a problem in the existing code, or was noticed and already fixed there in the past. Yet when it comes to UI, those introduced bugs --- breakages of users' existing workflows --- are often dismissed with "sorry, you can't do that anymore" or "here's a (longer and more cumbersome) workaround to do it".

I'm sorry, but besides fixing the UI where it impacts the usability of your application, no one is raving about how a redesign makes the application any better.

This brings up a great point: if you examine user's comments on redesigns that didn't really fix things, you'll find that the positive ones are all about how it looks or feels and tend to be vague, while the negative ones will almost all be very specific criticisms about precisely which part of their workflows got broken. In any other context the latter would be treated as bug reports --- very clear ones at that --- to be investigated and fixed; but it seems a lot of designers are inclined to simply "close"/ignore them all as "they don't like/understand what I did, maybe they just hate me."

Many creative professionals (that includes programmers) will go and do the thing they like instead of doing the thing that is needed. For architects that could be a ron of glass and open spaces while the people who use this space would rather have a space with lots of cosy private corners and spots, for programmers it is insisting on certain frameworks, languages or patterns despite hurting the project. For sounddesigners it is usign to most ober the top emotional sonic sledgehammer they find. For designers it can be worshipping the latest style, wrongly understood minimalism etc.

All of these things usually mean the person at hand might be able to produce something, but they are essentially the wrong person for the wrong job.

And let’s face it: these kind of redesigns are often something the new CEO wants to sbow to everybody how much change he embodies. The designer is underpaid and unfamilsr with the product, the project not well organized and the deadline soon.

Any designer worth their money should be able to redesign a UI while improving it. Understanding the value of what is already there and how it maps to user tasks, daily routines and understanding the relevant assumptions, is the main part of the job.

So whst you describe is not good design it is bad design or design that never got the chance to be good.

> Many creative professionals (that includes programmers) will go and do the thing they like instead of doing the thing that is needed.

I'll add to your list of examples: lawyers representing their clients often want to make new precedent with the court and the direction of the law, rather than just getting their client our of a burdensome lawsuit.

> will go and do the thing they like instead of doing the thing that is needed

You know, it's funny. Just this morning I was thinking about how companies are often cheats and liars, and how the capital growth motive often discourages innovation after a certain point--ie, directing workers to do the thing the company likes, rather than what's useful to users.

A trivial example would be Spotify's music genealogy and recommendations. How good does it have to be, for users to keep paying? Not very. So perhaps there's a lot of room to improve it, but because the profit margins are so slim, it won't get done--even if a Spotify engineer is personally motivated.

On the flip side, you could see a person selling their labour as having some right/stake in doing something which interests them.

These outcomes are then compromises which give something to the producer, as well as to the customer.

I completely agree. This is exactly why I said, if this happens you didn’t choose the right person for the job.

The same person who butchers your UI might be very good for creating print designs that above all need to sell the company CI.

For critical redesigns you need a designer who is mostly about analyzing and rethinking the user experience behind it. Better even, split it in two: one entity should only do the analytical part and guide the direction, the other should implement it with a little bit of wiggle room. Make sure there is some overlap between the two

I think I agree with you, but how are you supposed to assess designers to choose the right person?

The main difference I've found between bad/good designers is flexibility and willingness to ask for help. There's typically a lot of organizational knowledge about where pain points are. If a designer addresses those, then people are generally happy.

Maybe splitting the job is a good idea, but it seems like you shouldn't need a split if the designer is listening to the whole team.

Also, sometimes the designer is fine, but they've been explicitly told by management what to do, so no designer would have been able to fill the position and do a good job. Even on my failed projects, I really couldn't tell you if it was the management or the designer that caused the resulting design issues.

> you didn’t choose the right person for the job

This is, however, the state of the entire economy, when organic individuals are cribbed into roles defined by firms with abstract goals. A good counterexample might be the Montessori system.

I agree with all that. But I'll add this. If the CEO is in any way involved with design, then you're already fucked. At every company I've every worked for either a) the company is big enough that the CEO doesn't even know there's a UX specialist, or b) the CEO defers to the UX specialist.

Good designers will improve visual systems, usability, task efficiency, consistency, symbolism, brand perception, and more concrete things with a redesign. If they don't, they're artists, not UX designers. FWIW, most redesigns I see in the wild are doing most or some part of these very real improvements.

That said, qualitative value is still value. Just because user feedback on the visual quality is vague doesn't mean that broader goals weren't achieved—users don't know how to evaluate visual quality, but it can still impact their behavior and perception. Good user researchers will look at outcomes and downstream impact in other behavior after a redesign, and those are often positively impacted.

Even if the result is just "users feel our company is more professional and mature," that could be extremely important for company strategy and may very well have been a limiting factor beforehand.

Yep, not everything that counts can be counted. I see a lot of things got treated as unimportant just because it cannot be measured in number (or we don't know how, yet)

Technical rewrites break functionality all the time. Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing is famous because Microsoft are one of the few companies who devote significant effort to backwards compatibility of APIs. Keeping things the same has a huge opportunity cost.

The reason people don't compliment a redesign of a user experience because the upsides are not immediately obvious. They benefits might be subconscious or change the product in a way that an existing user will take time to understand. The Facebook feed was a classic example of this. At the time Facebook was a directory of profiles and the feed introduced something users weren't explicitly asking for (aggregation of updates from friends). It was was seen as a regression, but it was built off a deep understanding of how the people were engaging with the product. You can hate Facebook for what they've become, but from a business and product perspective that change was enormously successful.

Great point.

If feature X stops working because a back end developer broke the code, that's treated as a bug.

If feature X can't be used because a UX developer obscured it, that should be treated as a bug, too.

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