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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn."

This just isn't true. In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters. Going through the menus in Firefox or Chrome is rare, enough so that Chrome tends to look different every time I do it.

But for real programs, the UI defines the workflow, and that should be optimized, even at the expense of familiarity. Just be sure that it actually IS better.

So yes, the quoted advice should probably be considered and possibly adopted by FireFox and maybe Chrome. But desktop software shouldn't accept it without a huge dose of salt.

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> "There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn."

Yeah, I guess I was overstating the case for rhetorical purposes. I don't think there's never a UI change that improves on what you already know. Once in a while a new interface comes along that's so much more efficient that it's worth retraining yourself. What I'm trying to say is that these changes are rare. I think designers tend to overestimate the benefit of a change and underestimate the power of habituation.

(P.S. thanks for catching my typo ("haver"). Fixed it.)

I think he is quoting someone with that line but I can't place it. If I remember correctly the purpose of that advice was not to keep you from ever changing your UI, but to instead weigh the cost carefully.

Eh? The UI isn't just the menus! It's the shortcut keys and the ways in which functionality is exposed and a whole lot else.

"In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters."??? In a web browser, the UI is the ONLY thing that matters. Every browser out there can render a web page. It's how it responds to the user and what it enables you to do that makes all the difference.

The biggest reason I stick with FF is the pentadactyl extension - A browser without decent vi-like controls is intolerable to me, and chrome's equivalent isn't up to par. So I stick with FF, for the UI.

"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn."

I hope this doesn't become the epithet of Windows 8!

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