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Comment by egsmi | Hacker News Reader

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.

What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.

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Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.

Why can't one stick with the old UI with a web application? That's an implementation choice Google makes.

Doesn’t that double the support surface? Bugs are still going to pop-up in the old interface, and so do you still tackle those or move engineer focus to the new interface? It seems weird to continue spending engineer time on an interface that is being phased out.

Course you can. Just have an opt-in new UI. Confluence has done that really well, for example. CircleCI have been doing it.

Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.

Once you have worked with a product doing these kind of things, you'll understand you'll need to double or even triple the efforts to be able to support two branches of the same feature. Of course this doesn't apply to simple applications.

Yes, I know.

If you're implying Google can't afford it but CircleCI can, then while I understand your logic, I disagree with your understanding of reality.

If you're not, then I disagree with your understanding of logic.

Confluence removed quite a few features from the new UI.

I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.

> Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.

Well regardless, they still pulled off the harder technique.

That Atlassian Confluence model you gave had some serious issues, they they are going to turn off the option to keep the old UI as well, and it is an enormous strain on Engineering resources to keep two different versions of an entire application UI up to date.

One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.

Yeah but it's necessary. The old UI would cause people to leave; the new one is actually really good.

This comment is both simultaneously sad and hilarious.

There's still threads on hacker news today bemoaning the ribbon UI and harking back to the good old days of drop down menus, and how great it was to be a power user back then. If you're after an example of a UI change with minimal blowback then I think this is a poor example!

I didn't say anything about minimizing blow back. I agreed that there will be blow back. But life moves on.

Exactly. Every Facebook design change was decried loudly. Then no one really gave a single faint fuck about it in a few weeks.

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