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Comment by rerdavies | Hacker News Reader

People like to use software they can trust. Having an out-of-date UI is a violation of trust. It says that whoever owns it doesn't care about it anymore.

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It's the other way around for me. The product that goes through more redesigns (and inevitably hides or drops features as a result) seems shakier.

In comparison, I'm still using foobar2000 and Craigslist 20 years later.

It depends on the product. If it's a site that you're directly making payments on, customers usually want to see something something that looks modern and recently updated. I don't have the wording for the survey question, but the result boiled down to old looking sites/creaky clunky sites are seen as less trustworthy to ecommerce buyers, at least the ones one of my former clients surveyed.

Craigslist is famously old school. But if I go to an online retailer of any scale and the site looks like something out of the late 90s, I'm going to be suspicious that nothing (including security practices) has been updated in the last 20 years.

Other things like non-monetized blogs can stand being retro.

Yeah, the average user gets very used to "modern UI design" and then immediately starts noticing older designs. This flags the site as being "less safe" and when money is involved, "less safe" is a pretty big red flag.

I'm sure PMs and Data Analytics teams have actual data to back me up on this, and if the data shows to the contrary please correct me. I'm working with a small subset of friends and family who are, for the most part, your "average" user, so it's all anecdata for me.

On the flip side, stop fucking with messaging app UI.

Just wait 15 years and it'll be back in fashion. Aero Glass is already back!

That’s just like your opinion man

the Dude abides

On the other hand, nothing says "I can be trusted" like a UI which gets overhauled for no good reason and suddenly becomes way worse because they ripped out essential features in the process.

I don't care about a splash of CSS to make it look fresh - just leave the rest of the UI alone, please.

Of course, websites that look like they are from 2000 make people think "what is wrong with this thing?". But it is not necessary to do redesign every year. Just make website mobile adapted and update it only when UI trends change significantly (every 5-10 years) and it will not look abandoned

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