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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

What some people will think:

"Improving your UI is a waste of time"

"UI is pointless"

What the author is actually saying (imo): "UI redesigns create costs that should warrant them. There are a lot of times when a website makes radical redesigns for comparatively marginal improvements. These improvements are not always worth it for reasons like existing userbase having to relearn the new ui."

This is a fair point and I think a lot of times places rebrand because they want to look like they're doing something even if it comes at the cost of overall usability.

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Yes there is an echo chamber of design, that leads to a lot of "FOMO" and "Keeping up with the Joneses". Of course you can have a perfectly functional social network, for instance, running on vanilla Bootstrap. Nothing wrong with that, but you'll never attract more customers than the cool company with the slick design.

Of course that's how it always has been.

There is also a lot unnecessary fear of change when it comes to design and UI.

I used to have the same fears, but after working with analytics and AB testing, I realize that they are mostly unfounded.

90% of the time the changes are not going to have much of an impact either way outside of superficial user behavior that doesn't impact the bottom line.

It doesn't matter nearly as much as you think in most cases. A lot of design is BS but there is even more BS coming from those fearing change.

Yes. And redesigns are specifically the issue.

Q: What gesture should be used for answering a call on a touchscreen phone: tapping a button, or swiping?

A: I don't know, but once you've picked one and users have learned it, don't suddenly change it without explanation and make your users panic because they can't answer calls.

Its a fair point because its a generic point.

Changing something that already works well enough introduces risk. You might make some things better, you might make some things worse. If things are already pretty good, making changes might result in making more things worse than better.

True with most things. UI/UX, art, software, architecture, writing, etc etc

This is how I felt when Meetup.com completely redesigned their site and logo.

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