It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange!
Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.
I purchased a Tesla model 3 in 2019. Adjusting to controlling everything on a tablet in the center of the car was a huge change from every car I had driven previously, but I gradually got used to the UI and memorized the layout. In December 2021, Tesla launched a new UI that moved the buttons around and hid many single tap actions behind multiple taps. It was terrible. The last place I want a redesigned UI is in a car I currently own. They should have only launched the refresh on new models. It wasn’t the main reason I sold the car, but it certainly didn’t help. Big UI changes can be exhausting.
You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them.
I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
But I guess we're the minority!
My experience is that regular users hate changes, period. Doesn't matter if it looks much prettier now. The button isn't where it was or changed color and they are now confused.
This is starting to change as more people had computers in a phase of their life where they were happy to experiment. But it will still be many years until the majority of the working population evaluates changes on design and performance criteria instead of just disliking them for being different than before.
Like Windows 11 for some reason centers the buttons on the screen. I'm not quite seeing what that improves since now things move around, and the start button is no longer in the very comfortably reachable corner by default.
A few days ago, a new search bar showed up in Windows 11 and I immediately closed it without trying it in any way. Months ago, I switched to DuckDuckGo because I couldn't disable Google's search result highlighting. I hate the new microwave in our house because it doesn't let me type in seconds and instead I have to push some "Automatic 1" for a fixed 60 second interval (there's probably a better way, but my wife threw away the manual).
Sometimes, better is worse. I am so close to switching to a basic Linux distro like Gentoo just to avoid these surprises.
<citation needed>. I don't think I ever saw anyone say more than "ok it looks kinda neat" and that isn't commentary on "liking" just "well, they changed it and it is not terrible yet".
Most of UI changes in long running software honestly looks like designers (or their managers most likely) trying to excuse their employment than anything acutally useful for the user
Why would you think so? It's not like any vendor goes and asks them about it, before making a UI overhaul.
In my experience - which I recognize is anecdotal - they absolutely hate those changes, even more than professional users, because it's even harder for them to find their bearing again. Non-tech-savvy people in particular don't have the experience and developed mental models to pin-point and describe the sources of their dissatisfaction, so they round it up into "tech sucks" or "my computer is slow, maybe it has viruses, I probably need a new one".
People have nostalgia for 98 and XP, but try to use any software from around that era and it’s the equivalent of riding a bicycle on a highway. Definitely not 5 km/hr slower every year
You and I must use disjoint sets of software then. For me, cloud software is universally slower than legacy software. Good chunk of it is because of the browser. The UI, by default, is jankier and slower for every interaction - to the point I can notice the delay on every click, which for desktop software even 15 years ago was true only when the machine was under large load - not literally all the time.
And that's without considering UI interactions that block on network requests.
And so, I find trivial webapps to be just jankier. For anything serious though, they're near-useless, as the performance drop prevents using the app or, in some cases, slows down the entire machine. 2D raster and vector editors, and 3D modelling software, is still done primarily as desktop apps for a reason.