Average UX Improvements Are Shrinking over Time
nngroup.com
nngroup.com
In the automotive space I’d argue there has been a UX regression as they went pure touch screen for some models.
However, they've invested in this in the past decade, and if there's going to be a UX resurgence, it's going to be in the automobile sector, as their teams are maturing more and more.
I can't say I see this at all. Even their tactile controls are generally a mess.
Controls as basic as window wipers or headlights seem to be different for ever car for no discernible advantage.
A different 'start' mechanism for every car is actually quite a nightmare. I once spent 20 minutes in a car park trying to figure out how to get the damn thing to start, even their own instructions didn't say how!
I've driven a bunch of cars, over the years. I haven't seen too many different mechanisms.
What have you seen on modern cars that's different than make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch pedal depressed) and turn the key, or for keyless make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch in), press the brake and push the button? And if the key battery is low, press the button with the key.
I've driven some older vehicles where you turned the key to enable ignition, but had a separate starter button, and some vehicles with ignition locks that didn't work, so you could turn the ignition without a key. And some cars with keys go off -> accessories -> ignition -> starter vs accessories <- off -> ignition -> starter. If the key retention in the switch/lock is broken, sometimes it's tricky to make sure you pull the key out in off instead of accessories.
1. It had a fob that worked as a key, but it didn’t look like a key and the key slot didn’t look like where the fob should go.
2. You set the handbrake using the left foot, but release it with a pull handle with your right hand!
Both were unintuitive, and would catch out some people (I am generally well above average in working out how to use execrable user interfaces).
The worst UI is often to release the door to fill fuel. More than once I’ve needed to ask for help on unfamiliar cars, and multiple people also not knowing how.
0: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motor-shows-geneva-motor-...
1: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/11/navy-ditches-touchscreens-...
Anecdotally, I bought a used 2019 Corolla recently and the "maintenance needed" alert that beeped and flashed while I was driving down the highway scared the crap out of me. It turned out that it was merely reminding me to get my oil changed, I couldn't believe it. It was so much less polished of an experience than I was used to with the 'Yota.
It's also possible to do great touchscreen UIs. I'd hate if my phone had t9 keyboard.
Resistive touchscreens are used because they can be manipulated by people wearing gloves, something that is certainly common in automotive scenarios.
Hurley and Behnken worked with SpaceX to "refine the way that you interface with the touchscreen and the way your touch is actually registered on the display in order to be able to fly it cleanly and not make mistakes touching it," Hurley said.
Scary imo.
In the aviation world, owners are spending $50,000 upgrading their trainer Cessnas and Pipers to do exactly that.
I'm still good with a paper sectional chart.
For many projects we've been involved in with our UX/UI Design service for SaaS companies, founders worked with us before releasing their product. So before the product was released we could eliminate common pitfalls based on our previous experiences. When a product is released you can then use data to optimise things.
An other issue I have with the article is that in some cases I've seen upclose, a tiny tiny percentage improvement in UX equaled an extra 6-figure increase in revenue. When a product is in a stage of optimising UX for more revenue, it's in the company's best interest to focus on the improvements that have direct impact on company revenue. So improving the UX on pricing pages, cancellation user flows etc.
This means a smaller UX improvement, sometimes really really small, but a huge upside for the business. So smaller UX improvements does not mean it has less effect on businesses. If anything, it's more likely the impact is growing because UX optimisations don't happen in random places anymore.
Is this ecommerce/landing page type UX? Or post login/SaaS type UX improvements.
"This doesn’t mean that we can expect 50% of all design projects will have an improvement score within that range. It’s possible your own impact could be a 500% or 5,000% improvement, but our data suggests that an improvement score that high is unusual."
There are business models where companies are optimizing for the opposite ("engagement"), and that's unfortunate. But there are also apps and sites that have no need for that and are just cargo culting the same UX features, and that's avoidable.
Firefox's UI is just appalling in a number of ways.
For your use case, you could use the Cookie Auto Delete extension and configure it appropriately. Combined with Multi Account Containers and Temporary Containers, your life will be a lot easier.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21165087/ios-apple-push-no...
I'll use PC gaming as an example: go back a decade of more, and it wasn't uncommon to need to use a significant portion of the keyboard (or on a console, more awkward controls). These days things are much better in a lot of games. The use of contextual controls allows the use of the same button for multiple tasks. Tabbed menus mean you don't have to have a separate key for each thing, even if many games still provide that option.
That's not to say all applications have better UX than in the past. The ERP system where I work is truly cumbersome. But there's still a certain commonality of UX "language" in lots of newer projects that mean software engineers aren't having to figure this stuff out from first principles.
So more UX focus is happening before release phases instead of after release, which means there will be much less opportunities for UX improvements after the release of each feature.
Also analyzing and tracking is a default everywhere now. So many feature requests are already backed with data related to user-behavior. Which means many of them kind of include UX improvements.
I think UX impact is bigger than before. But, it's becoming part of the process and it's more mature now.
It's like website design. Far fewer jobs available in that field because so many now just use lightly configured, pre-built themes. Website designs, in other words, are standardized far more than ever.
Yes, there are exceptions, as others here describe, but they don't negate a clear trend.
remember that function is only important in closed software insofar as it keeps people from moving to something else. If the cost of the move is higher than the cost of bad UX there's no buisness incentive to fix it.
Not at all, the field is exploding, and people's expectations are constantly evolving. Because UX is fundamentally about people, there will never be a final 'end state'.
It's a bit like saying software is a "solved problem" - in reality, the needs of businesses and people will always change.
So my question is: how does this study compensate for changes to the frequency of updates?
Previous version only made you click past the warning once. New version makes you click every time, and there's a noticeable delay before the config settings appear.
Previous version had comfortable spacing, with everything clearly readable without excessive wasted space. New version adds an absurd amount of padding to waste your screen space.
Previous version let you sort by column, so you could easily see all the setting you'd changed. New version removes this feature.
about:config is mostly used by the kind of person who complains about user-hostile policies and declines to accept advertising and spying, so if you want to do these kind of things then making it worse can help drive those users away. Simply deleting it is too obvious, but sabotaging the UX has plausible deniability. If you dumb everything down enough you'll only have dumb users, and dumb users are more easily exploited. I can think of no other reason why somebody put serious time and effort into actively making it worse.
(The old UI is actually still available at chrome://global/content/config.xhtml, but now that it's no longer supported it's easier for them to remove it later.)
Edit: Didn't see your last line about chrome://global/content/config.xhtml , now I can get the old behaviour back. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...
You might be partly right. I mean, I've worked in UX for more than a decade and I've never met anyone who did this deliberately. But over-optimizing for the novice experience essentially produces the same result.
A decade ago it was trivially easy to find improvements that benefited all users, but these days platforms are a lot more mature and there are fewer universally beneficial usability improvements like that left. At this point making improvements for one persona often result in regressions for others. It comes down to a business decision of which users matter and how the changes impact the bottom line. And you sort of have to make a call because if your company decides not to optimize for a profitable set of users then your competitors will.
I've never worked on UX for a web browser, but my guess is that they're mostly optimizing for novice users and safety at the expense of the power user experience. I don't see that changing as long as their business model depends on appealing to the largest possible number of users. Of course I wasn't in the room when the team made that call and you may be right that they're engaging in some dark pattern shenanigans to actively sabotage your experience and make you leave but I seriously doubt it's that explicit -- no one's actively trying to drive you away, they just don't particularly care about you. You might be able to find a niche web browser just for expert users that meets your need, but I'm not not sure how they'd sustain the business.
Having said that, there are lots business models in which power users are profitable. I've worked on expert systems (military, finance, ETL, data science) that often have crazy high learning curves for novices because whenever there's a tradeoff they optimize for the efficiency and stability for expert users. Having said that, these systems can be expensive (for example ~24k/yr/seat) so the businesses can afford to focus on optimizing for a small number of expert users.
Considering how much things can be achieved via about:config registry in Firefox, then you're probably right. Not sure if entries can be still loaded with userChrome.css and userContent.css - back then I was using these to preconfigure browser for friends. These could be dropped into freshly created profile (via -P switch, without launching browser) and act like sorta "answer files".
Logins.
My workflow on any app is:
1. Attempt to register 2. Find out I already have an account / I wait for a registration link that never comes 3. Find the “Forgot password” link, often buried.
Multiply this friction by 3X to 5x on mobile devices.
It’s a challenge with many issues, but the go-to design patterns for the most impactful interaction a user will have with a platform is totally broken.
Just this week my son had to drop a class and re-add it due to issues with his username. The issue? The one he had wasn’t recognized on login and when he went to create it he got an error message (unfriendly of course) that it already existed.
Agree with the premise, but there are definitely sink holes in today’s UX/UI.
Link expires in 10 minutes and cannot be used more than once.
There is only so much you can do with a multi-touch display and a finite number of gestures.
Thinking back to my own experience over a decade ago, the role of design in the development process has changed much for the better - it’s that much harder to make obvious UX mistakes now that design and development teams are used to working collaboratively rather than throwing things over the wall.
I would have expected to see "users are becoming more savvy and sophisticated about UI's", as well as something along the lines of "Many experiences and sub/micro experiences are becoming standardized. It's difficult to optimize that which is already perfected."
I think they have measured improvements brought by Bootstrap. Released in 2011, since than websites look similar.
It looks like the article focuses on websites. But things can get very different if you compare desktop to mobile, web apps to "normal" websites, and web apps to native apps.
The web seems to get all the attention, and one can argue that the UX is improving, especially on mobile. However, everything that is not the web, like desktop apps, or worse, special purpose hardware, is being shoved into the web model and with it comes a significant degradation.
does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006?
Not really. The kinds of changes they're taking about get tested. A site will collect data, make changes and observe the impact on the data. A good way to go is present different users a randomly selected version of a site and track which version does better. With tests like that we can rule out people simply adapting over time.
I've always wondered if the reverse study is done; keep the old versions of the UX around for months/years as an experiment to make sure the improvements are still there, or if there's a regression to the mean. This sounds much harder to do because most development is roll-forward with new features and such.
Also; practically how does attribution play into conversion measurements? In theory it should be easier now to tell whether it was landing-page+UX or view-through/click-through that made the bigger difference.
I am rather sad only Apple is really doing much in this field. Especially when I continue to loss faith in Tim Cook for some strange reason.