Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

They went full carbon-copy with this product, so it seems that they acknowledge that the UX in this space is key.

How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone? You can't. Old habits die hard. Modernizing or changing any fundamental UX in Access is probably a very unpopular choice within their current userbase and likely more expensive than starting from scratch.

It's simpler to go and copy Airtable which is already proven to be a successful model/UX and let that product cannibalize the market of your legacy products.

View on HN

I think there's so much truth to UX being king, especially for tight-knit forward-thinking teams. However, these products always seem to ignore heavy use cases common in large orgs. Like lots of records and nuanced permissions that really fit business rules. I started from that direction with https://www.cloudternal.com (and will have a great UX eventually too!).

Looks great! I just singed up for early access. I'm currently helping a company choose a CRM. We went with Salesforce but I'd love to find a cheaper alternative. However it doesn't seem you can create automation within your product. Unless I'm mistaken?

Curious - what made you go with Salesforce?

Mainly it's what I'm familiar with. But I did try and use other CRM's (including SuiteCRM, Airtable and a few others) and didn't find the important combination of:

1) Modern UI's I didn't need to write myself

2) Automation with and transactional atomic write guarantees

3) An extensible and scalable sharing model

Although I didn't try dynamics. I'm guessing it's a suitable alternative.

We don't currently have automation, but we plan on having it ready either Q3 or Q4 this year (we might do mobile first, it depends on demand). Thanks for signing up, we'll reach out to you soon!

Microsoft has been doing a lot of this lately. Skype needed a massive overhaul to keep up so they made a Slack clone (Teams) that will slowly take over as people decide to switch. AWS and Atlassian products are polular? They create Azure and Azure Devops, which replaces Team Foundations and Visual Studios Online.

Admittedly, in that last one they actually just upgraded Visual Studio Online to turn it into Azure Devops and added new features.

> How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone?

Make a new opt-in UX supporting the same backend features (meaning that you need new features to support both) and maintain both. But it's expensive, so eventually you hope to merge them or kill one, which is where the risk of people getting pissed off arises again. GMail/Inbox, for example.

> How do you upgrade the UX of a legacy product like Access without pissing off everyone?

Incrementally.

The way people reacted to the Ribbon disagrees with you :) Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same, and people were furious. Rightly so, to a degree - learning to use it was an adjustment. Now imagine that the whole app's UI incrementally changed and not just parts of it... nobody's gonna be happy about that.

> Toolbars specifically were replaced with an improved chunk of UI, everything else was left the same

Was hiding the file menu items behind a round logo that looked nothing like a button part of that improved UI?

Is the current file menu that looks like the rest of the menus but behaves totally different part of the improved UI?

The Menus were a toolbar before the ribbon existed, which is why you could customize them. Visual Studio was the same. So it was natural for the ribbon to eat up the menus as well. Certainly that's part of why people disliked it, but the artificial separation between 'menu' and 'toolbar' was already kind of a problem and that's why they were unified.

People disliked Ribbon because it took a logical system geared towards power users (hierarchical menus) and replaced it with an organic system geared towards new users (usage-driven ordering).

There was no way that wasn't going to piss off a very vocal segment of users, and Microsoft, to their detriment, badly botched the messaging.

My point is that even if Ribbon was a good idea the implementation had a number of flaws that made me question of UX really was the reason and not something else.

My go-to example is how the File menu was hidden behind a non-button that looked just like a fancy application logo.

Why would an actual, caring ux developer do that in a flagship product?

Am I the only damn person that liked the ribbon's?!

I don't think it's a question of what people ultimately like. It's that change is frustrating, especially for only marginal benefit.

I like the ribbon today, and I complained when it was released. And I stand by that complaint, I think pushback against change serves an important role, and developers should feel pain when making UX changes.

It's not just a matter of some changes being bad, even when they're good there's a cost. My grandparents both had iPhones, loved them and loved learning to do different things on them. Whenever I'd visit they'd have a laundry list of things they wanted to learn to do. Over time, that list was slowly supplanted by relearning how to do things they once knew, but had changed. It was extremely frustrating because so much of it was near-pointless. Easy for me (and most of their test-base, I'm sure) to relearn, but very difficult for nonagenarians.

Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back.

This is simply an issue of creating generational products that adapt to the new ways your demographics are using technology. You can incrementally change a product but you will never be able to use new interaction patterns in a product that is used by people who don't know them and don't want to learn them.

Generation Z and Generation Alpha kids are not going to use Access. They will be using this or whatever succeeds this. That's for sure.

This is the same reason why Apple is going full steam into making the iPad its core productivity and creativity device. Newer generations have way better dexterity when using touch as an input, than let's say my generation (millennials). They know Macbooks are products with a UX expiration date.

>> Windows incrementally removed the "Start" button and had to roll back.

I mean, flat out removing something, by definition, is not incremental.

I don't remember how it happened as I had moved off of Windows in that period, maybe they made it slowly opaque over a couple releases.

If you can’t remove elements, you can’t refine design incrementally.

They should've shrunk the button down each release. For any features I plan to remove I'll gradually make them smaller.

The corner still worked as a start menu, and they told you that on first run. It was as incremental as possible.

"They told you it was there" from a UX perspective is about as good as it not being there.

Didn’t they keep the “start” button but change the menu to the full screen Win8 version until they brought back the menu for Win10?

I’m a Millennial and I’ll gladly use an iPad as my primary computer if it actually does everything a normal laptop can do. I honestly don’t see a difference in touch-based technology aptitude or dexterity between Millennials and Gen Z.

I considered myself pretty good with touch devices until I saw a kid editing a video in TikTok. Believe me, they have more dexterity.

I learned to use a computer with a physical keyboard and mouse. My nephew’s first and main computing device was an iPad. That definitely makes a difference.

This is interesting, would you be able to find something on YouTube that highlights this dexterity? I’m not entirely sure what to look for to see this new way of computing.

Look up videos of 20-somethings using Ableton Push and similar devices. They don't just play music with it. They use it to make entire songs at every stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeybdD5UoQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA

I already have enough trouble with a piano with clear groupings to help find notes. I don't think I would get far with one of these.

This is certainly impressive, and I couldn’t do it, but I seen no reason why someone who puts an appropriate amount of hours into practice couldn’t do this too, no matter their age.

> they have more dexterity.

Carpet industry is infamous for this, employing kids for their 'nimble fingers' for manipulating delicate knots.

However, question is the same generation who are dexterous in editing TikTok video on mobile phone will grow up and loose dexterity. So, are we talking about new interface paradigm for only kids (and not any specific generation - X, Y or Z)?

Essential tremors are absolutely a thing as one ages too (and develops a coffee habit).

Interesting. I didn't think about it that way, but it's totally possible that you lose that ability as you grow older.

> Believe me, they have more dexterity.

Perhaps until you try them with tools like scissors, or manipulating objects like a piece of string?

I think Dexterity implies good skills with a wide range of affordances (not just with a touch interface).

That's the one thing you really don't want to do. I know, product and UX teams everywhere believe it's a good plan, but I suggest talking to users. There are few things that generate stronger emotions than "They moved my FUCKING menu item AGAIN"

They were actually doing that. Microsoft Access inherited many of the productivity features of Excel, such as filters in the column headers. It was great.

Where they dropped the ball was the core engine and capabilities.

What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was removing features from Access, such as the SQL Server based "Access Data Projects" (ADP) mode, which was much more scalable than the legacy Jet database mode.

Actually, filters in the column headers came from a database, Paradox that predated GUI apps and was a major player in the PC database market.

> What people wanted was quick & easy way to produce HTML5 forms and tables, but with the power of a native GUI app.

Spot on. As with all things, Microsoft-of-the-time saw the web as a competitor to its products, not a new platform.

They actually could have built substantial portions of Office 365 (which is to say, cloud -first and -integrated Office) in the early 2000s, but tried to protect their legacy businesses.

It's nice to see them finally getting there, but Access-to-Web would still be a killer product for much of Enterprise, if they could solve the data source connectivity issues in a clean way for users.

You could make a new platform to help people slowly migrate to. It's been done with other products. Check out Articulate Storyline / Rise.

Can't they separate UX from the rest? and have 2 UX for the same product?

I would say that often leads to poor UX

Windows 8 is a good example of why that might not work.

You can add views and leave the old ones in place

Wait, you’re talking about the same company that had clippy, and moves around their ribbon as if the plot is none of our business?

Aren't both of them copies of Trello. They even copy Joel's description of the application as a list of lists: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

I don't think they're in the same space. Trello is a list of todo lists. Whereas Airtable and lists are for data you'd put in a spreadsheet or database.

Trello is moving into this space with some of their automation plugins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com