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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing (nor, frankly, an unjustified one). What surprises me is that we haven't figured this out yet and rehash the same flame war every time.

The desktop environments show this best: c.f. Gnome 3. Also Gnome 2. And Gnome 1 for that matter (vs. KDE2). And KDE4. And KDE3. And Windows Vista. And OS X Lion.

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I actually find the redesign quite nice. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it when I first switched to it, I "temporarily reverted back" which helped me "map" the old functionality to the new. Stuff the blogger is ranting about are all easily "fixed" back to the old look and style, but he hasn't gone to the trouble of looking. In fact, the 2nd comment on site tells you how. The demarkation thing, I haven't used the default theme ever since additional ones were available, I see his point but just adding a background solves that. There is also new functionality for display density, i used the one which reverted to the old look.

But at least they have provided the functionality to go back to an old style look (albeit i had to dig around a bit and the average user may struggle, GMail settings are not the most user friendly IMO). I very rarely use it, but I still struggle with the ribbon style menu in MS Office, and that's been around for years!

I heavily disliked the new Gmail setup at first. But what it did do was kinda force me into learning all the keyboard shortcuts. (as I still don't know what half the buttons do...) Makes my workflow so much nicer. because of this, I do enjoy gmail even more.

(I'm still not a fan, as I can't use my old custom color scheme, but that's another matter)

> I still don't know what half the buttons do...

Do you have JS disabled? They all have tooltips.

fair enough. I guess my point was, I learned the keyboard shortcuts for those actions, so I never need to use the buttons. It was an exaggeration, the trash can icon isn't hard to figure out. But I don't even see them anymore, it's the "I don't use it, so I don't see it" blindness.

I highly recommend picking up the keyboard shortcuts, they are so amazingly fantastic. deleting, reading, labeling, archiving, marking important/unread. they all work wonders.

You can switch from icons to text labels in the settings.

> People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing

I've had some thoughts on this recently, and wholeheartedly disagree. We spend aeons engineering stability into every other interface within a software ecosystem, since it's supposed to improve stability, reduce surprising breakage, improve engineer efficiency, discoverability, etc., but when it comes to interfaces in the user plane, it's like the only established methodology is FUCK YOU Driven Development.

In these systems, and Gmail, the user is not considered an intelligent, complex actor in the system, but instead something more like a child sitting in a cinema whose only criteria for synchrony is to be repeatedly dazzled by confounding changes to the way it interacts with the system.

This is fundamentally wrong in so many ways. Not least, the user is the main purpose for the existence of these systems (er, right??), and yet the user's interface to the system is the one most likely to functionally break without warning.

You cannot address the reliability of the entire system without considering the last mile - dropping a change the size of the Gmail redesign on millions of users without a multitude of small iterations, or with a huge amount of fanfare and warning, is an unmitigated disaster for the reliability and efficiency of the overall system.

I don't give 2 fucks how much of the scientific method was abused to create the new system up to that point, if it doesn't comfortably fit the millions of delicate tendrils that have grown between my mind and it, then from the user's perspective the change is much closer to an abject failure.

I suspect in years to come this will be an increasingly important area for study, and I pray the outcome to some extent will simply be that corporations will need to give up achieving quick feel-good wins by arbitrarily fucking with the user-machine interface, although I could be wrong. We could always be further reduced to that mindless entertainment-only child in the cinema, responsible only for the most basic direction of the outcomes of our interaction with the overall system, the tacit attitude of the large corporations as they drop huge changes like this without warning.

The outcry we hear over these changes isn't just bored people being picky, it's the sound of a trillion dying neurons in a million interconnected biological systems. Much as a fully grown cat wouldn't fare well being stuffed into a jar, the users here suffer just the same. Thin the cat's diet slowly over time, widen a border here, replace some text with an icon there, and the small bits of death and shrinkage that occur over time will mean that cat will soon be ready to contentedly purr its way into that jar and fall into a dreamy slumber all of its own accord.

Gmail gave people months to use the two interfaces side by side before dropping the old interface. And they flooded users with notifications of every incremental change, and were roundly mocked for that too. It is impossible to satisfy everyone all the time.

Keeping the old interface was a good move, although it only (at least for me) leads to procrastination. The same problem exists, which is the mental adjustment that you need to make at some point.

Another interesting angle is that in the new interface, they had to add a dropdown menu to control the amount of padding used on UI elements (compact, cosy, comfortable). Had they gradually moved from compact to cosy, then to comfortable over a longer period, the need to provide an option might have been removed entirely. So some of the complexity avoided in having incremental changes over a fixed term has instead become software complexity needing maintained over a potentially longer or indefinite period.

In either case, a gradual transition would avoid the need for all this. For me, the two biggest gotchas with the new design was the text->icons change and associated relocation of some buttons, and the border change. Had the text->icons change been introduced distinctly, and allowed to stew for a few weeks - months, then the border size changed from compact to cosy for a few months, I possibly would have had no reason to complain at all (the amount of adjustment/effort required for each individual change is amortized over time, and by the time a new change appears, my comfort level has already returned to maximum for the current state of the UI).

The approach is good, but the time given is too short. Compare with how long XP was kept alive alongside Vista.

I completely agree.

It's the sort of thing that happens when a priesthood in a field comes to possess the One True Knowledge. They start to issue statements like "you can't trust your intuition" and "you don't understand this enough to like it yet"

The outcry we hear over these changes isn't just bored people being picky, it's the sound of a trillion dying neurons in a million interconnected biological systems.

You seem to be suggesting that having to learn something new is like having your brain die. That seems inaccurate. Isn't learning a (not very) different interface more like having to exercise a muscle a little bit that you were hoping not to exercise? I mean, not a cool thing to do to your users if the new interface is worse, but not inherently a bad thing.

It's an email redesign, not the Holocaust.

The flames die down when people realize that there are design improvements that help them down the road.

OS X Finder UI is a mess anyway, so changes that make it easier for non-technical folk are probably net positives.

I don't have a good public example in mind, but the users at my employer often flip with volcanic rage when applications are changed -- even godawful VB5 legacy apps. Usually you can discern the "I hate change, and am typing up a memo of complaint" arguments versus "you made things worse" arguments based on who is complaining.

With respect to GMail, when people like pg who get the big picture are saying that the UI sucks, it probably sucks.

> With respect to GMail, when people like pg who get the big picture are saying that the UI sucks, it probably sucks.

this very website proves that that is not necessarily true.

This website's UI is not the prettiest, but it's extremely intuitive and functional. That's much more important in most cases.

Agreed of course, and actually I don’t mind the look.

The problems are: small unreadable font, small controls/buttons, content too wide to read comfortably, doesn’t correctly support mobile, links that rely on cookies that expire (what is this? 1998?).

> Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it.

That isn't a usability disaster. That is a habit/memory disaster.

You say potato, I say potato. To someone who spends their working life in gmail (or whatever) having it suddenly go away, being replaced with a different tool which requires different workflows is certainly a "disaster" in some sense. It's an equivalent annoyance, for example, to losing one's laptop or phone and having to restore a new one from scratch (assuming you have working backups anyway).

What it's not is incontrovertible proof that the new one is "bad". It might be great, but it's still a net loss of productivity while the users learn it.

You're begging the question.

If we take what you say is true every redesign is good, which is patently false.

A perfect example is the Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster. Also putting Vista in your list there, mmmmmm. Wasn't exactly a great redesign was it.

The Google redesign is also pretty much a disaster.

Am I the only one that actually likes the ribbon? I can actually find the options I want to use in Office 10 instead of trying to dig through dozens of drop down menus.

"Am I the only one ..."

The answer to this is always "no."

Except this time.

Amusing, but untrue. I took a (long) while to like the ribbon, but I have to say that I find it a large improvement in usability, and it makes it vastly more likely that I will accept "other than the basic/defaults".

It actively encourages exploration. That's good for some use cases, and it's certainly good for Microsoft.

I love it, I used to be on the fence until I discovered the magical ALT key

I love it too; much easier to find features I don't use regularly.

Fair or not, I feel like people who complain about it today (years after it launched) are just announcing, "I'm bad at adapting."

> Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster

Are you kidding me?

the ribbon is the best thing MS has done in a long time. a ballsy move, but absolutely needed to have a UI that is able to guide users through the very complex functionalities of excel, etc.

use ms office daily, love the ribbon.

I use excel every week or so and I grumble at that stupid ribbon every time.

I _was_ a proficient excel user once upon a time but now I feel like I'm trying to cook in my kitchen after some "organization expert" came in and moved all my stuff.

IMO, life is too short to have to re-learn stuff you already know.

Same boat. I was a very proficient Excel user. The ribbon completely fucked my workflow. In addition, they broke just enough of the shortcut keys to break my flow.

What shortcut keys did they break?

I don't recall exactly. I'd been away from much use of Excel for a few years, then had occasion to use it helping someone else. Whereupon I suddenly went from an early 200x version (lastly 2003, I think?) to 2007.

The ribbon was annoying enough. But then I started manipulating using shortcut keys. And a subset didn't product the expected results.

I spent some years working heavily in Excel, including extensive on-the-fly worksheet structure modification (shoving data around, adding and deleting rows and columns, copying values or just the "text" portion of cells, etc., etc.). So those shortcuts were second-nature, or "muscle memory", as they say, if a bit stale.

It was a one-off, helping that person. I currently do a little budgeting in Excel, but without much such manipulation, so I haven't continued to trip across and so recall in detail what broke.

I do continue, in my more spiteful moments, to hope they reserve a special level of hell for the people who make such UI changes. For a subset of people, Excel is a heavy-duty industrial tool, and dicking with the UI is tantamount to dicking with their livelihood, not to mention peace of mind. At a minimum, implement and insist on backward compatibility (as an optional mode, at least), no matter how much your "rock star" designers piss and moan, or your Management pisses and moans about supporting multiple interfaces. You have a responsibility to the user base that has propelled your product to such success while integrating its functionality into their subconscious actions.

The Ribbon UI is one of the best improvements to Office in years.

I think that the office ribbon redesign was rather brave for MS. As a non-expert user of Office, I found it easier to find commonly used features--I can imagine how for experts it would be annoying--but for new users, it really helped with discovery and I'm considering the idea for some of my own projects...

I think, given the diversity of opinions in the responses to your post, you might want to rethink some of this. I certainly said no such thing. Some redesigns are "good", and some redesigns are "bad". But that decision is personal and subjective. You can't change a UI without annoying someone somewhere. And any UI that lots of people use regularly (gmail, Office and desktops are all great example) is going to have a metric ton of loud complainers every time they change.

And that applies whether or not the change has merit. It's inherent in the process. So any analysis of a UI that starts with an "I HATE THE CHANGES!" blog post is flawed and (in the scientific sense) biased. Show some testing, write your own rant, or just sit tight.

I actually like the ribbon, especially when working on tables, charts, and the like. My only complaint is that it takes up so much vertical screen real estate.

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