Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost.

It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!"

So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interactive, text fields with labels only approximated by gray text within that field, and on and on.

Many old UIs were uglier but more usable.

View on HN

A lot of that isn’t the redesign itself, but the fact that almost no one designs for the change event itself. It’s a whole different problem to solve, and it’s usually just dropping you into something totally different without context.

Could write a whole blog post on designing for UX change. I think I’ll do that...

Note that there sadly also is a very strong effect that also can "ruin" (in principle) good redesigns for existing users: When all else fails (i.e. you are not able to guide your design by existing metaphors etc.), humans learn by repetition. That's why consistency with other products is usually not a bad idea: Search bars are usually to the top right, so when you put yours there, a new user will know where to look.

OTOH, this also means that for a user who has used your product for ten years, the fact that your search bar is, in fact, not in the top right, doesn't matter -- because they have learned where it is. If you move it, they will be upset, even if the new design might objectively be more intuitive (as in: new users have less trouble with it).

This effect can make it rather hard at times to judge if a redesign of a product you've used for a long time is in fact as bad as you believe it to be.

On phone apps, if I noticed the UI 9/10 of the times I notice a UI change it's because I opened it do do something, but all I can see is a tutorial on how to use the new UI.

> login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username

I've been lead to believe that this is for websites that support authentication by multiple methods. If you submit your email address first they can look it up and see that you auth with SAML, or log you in through Google, or if you login with a password they can then render that form for you.

We do this with a single form, not necessary to have two steps

Explain why the hamburger menu is bad but the floppy disk icon is good.

The floppy disk icon does one thing: "Save". Everybody knows it does, because that's been its job for ages now. What it looks like is irrelevant.

The hamburger menu _replaced_ the style of menu we used to have, where all the options were under their own menus with titles ("File", and so on). That was lost. The only reason they were left behind was to make it work well on tiny screens. If you don't have a tiny screen, you just lost functionality that you were familiar with and that worked, for no reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com