Some people are always upset with change.
So stop redesigning your damn UIs!
I know why they do it. That's because if you don't change the UI, it is like you didn't change anything, and people don't feel the need to upgrade. It is important for marketing and therefore I don't expect it to change.
But if you really care about usability, don't change your UIs without a good reason. Also, keep in mind that not every user is a young tech addict, it is hard enough to explain to my grandparents how to use a computer/smartphone without them being thrown off by UI changes. Ok, it may not be where your money is, but that's part of accessibility.
Speaking for myself, it's also annoying when the redesign is half assed. I think it's awfully embarrassing that you can still dig deeply enough into settings panels in Windows and get XP themed panels. Hell, dig deep enough and there's probably even older ones lurking still.
You may like or may not like the new settings panels, but making them incomplete and redirecting you to the old ones for the missing features is just wrong. Even worse, they have been gradually adding the missing features for more than 10 years, breaking all familiarity, and they still didn't manage to finish the job.
I don't know what happened internally but Microsoft went from being arguably the best in the world to something that is objectively terrible. You may not like liquid glass, but at least, there is intent behind it. With Microsoft today, it looks like a collection of internship projects.
UX is not timeless, features emerge or go out of fashion, user behavior and expectations change, the hardware on which the UI/UX is operated changes. You only can incrementally evolve your ui/UX so far, as you can’t know what the future will look like.
There are zero legitimate benefits to it. It's just neat and cool, which is a very poor reason to do something.
They should've just... Not done it.
You defended "change" in general, not in this particular case. "Change could be good so this change must be good" is a weak argument that can be used to defend any change. This is a shallow dismissal of the complaints instead of a solid defense of the change.
The poor contrast of the UI strains the eyesight, all the transparency and glass effects are distracting and tiring, so are many of the animations which just introduce a delay for no reason, and so on. I unlock my phone and the top row of icons is "thrown" on the screen with a big delay and a very ample motion to the point it was disturbing.
These aren't useful changes, they cause a loss of practical value to many users even if they bring esthetic value to others. The changes most brought up in complaints are objectively worse that what we had before. It's form over function and tells the world the designers had no ideas how to practically improve the UI so they added visual bells and whistles, flashes and sparkles.
Yes but UI redesigns usually involve UX redesign as well. It's not just visual so you actually gain something from it (even if at first it feels like a regression).
But liquid glass helps me do what... see my background?....!?
Seriously unsure who thought it might be a good idea and why. Possibly just a diversion from the AI development falling behind schedule and competitors. I really cannot imagine a user cohort falling for this gimmich in large enough percentage to push this, I'd rather think no serious UX A/B testing was done.
Modern design is already pretty bad and usability and readability being almost ignored aspects, but this is the most arrogant step I met recently, despite the ambitious attempt by Posthog website redesign to be the champion in user-hostile UX category.
The Liquid Glass design has awful contrast, and seems really amateurish with how stuff on the screen overlaps. Looks like the stuff you'd see in KDE 10-15 years ago[1], back when compositing window managers were kinda hot and new.
[1] This is from 2012, and arguably deals with the transparency-induced readability issues better than Liquid Glass seems to: https://imgur.com/a/x1LmBAQ
This one is particularly bad because it's shit. It makes the device harder to use for most users. It introduces a load of utterly pointless, and/or confusing, patterns/motifs... like:
- why do some navigation buttons hover about 3 meters above the panel they control (the enormous drop shadow around back/next/close buttons)
- why is the settings sidebar floating above the settings panel content, such that only the image carousels but not the text slide under it?
- why are the rounded corners of panels and windows so round that about 40px of every window's height and width becomes unusable?
- why do I have to see my wallpaper, blurry, under every fucking control, icon, component, list and panel? It started with Lion where the wallpaper would bleed through the sidebars of windows, even when they had other windows beneath them
Someone at Apple decided the "desktop" paradigm that made their computers usable has become redundant, but they're taking it apart in tiny steps, drawn out over years and multiple releases. The desktop paradigm was really good: you could have multiple apps open side by side and drag & drop content between them, just like you could if you were assembling physical things on a physical desktop. With Liquid Glass, you wouldn't imagine that was possible, because parts of the apps hover 3m off the surface, making it visually unsettling to navigate your windows. And your windows are made of various grades of glass which is brittle, and smooth, and you can't stick anything to it. Glass isn't a work surface unless you're doing stained glass windows. To do work, you need the confidence the surface will hold up beneath your actions, and a little bit of friction so your materials and targets don't slide all over the place. Why on earth are Apple creating the illusion of an unworkable work surface?
I'm convinced they're trying to deprecate the menu bar entirely by making it less and less usable (thinner text, transparency), but they're not willing to move it to the tops of windows like on Windows. Are they hoping we'll all give up using (because they've made it shit) it so they can just let it go? (like iOS?).
I'm still mad at Youtube for their redesigns, to the point that I moved over to Freetube, since I found normal Youtube that hostile of an experience.
Went to Youtube Music instead, which doesn't seem to ever get updates and likely has been relegated to Google's project limbo.
It's fantastic. It's arguably a worse service, but I'll take that over the frustration of having to figure out yet another new and improved music listening experience every other time I open the Spotify app.
Ultimately, good design stays out of the way. Design changes is design getting in your face, ... which is the diametric opposite of staying out of the way.
All of these are fixable without backing away from the big idea. But it’s pretty rough so far.