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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me come online on Skype, so she called me. There's an ocean between us currently. She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel stupid or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to me that she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started crying. She was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail. She's approaching 60 and isn't as technically adept as some of us, so that is admittedly a factor.

Seeing her cry about this made me change the way I think about what some users go through when they experience unexpected UI changes. I remember hearing people say they got confused by Windows 8 tiles, and didn't think it was such a big deal. After seeing my mom cry over a UI change, I think there are better ways to implement UI changes than simply shoving them down people's throat. Sure, if it must be done, it must be done (UI change), but don't shove it down people's throats unexpectedly and with no hand-holding at all.

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On a similar but different note, there were stories of children getting upset at the new look of iOS 7. When I saw the headline I thought it odd, because I doubt the designers of iOS 7 ever thought they'd actually make someone cry with the new design.

But what can be done about it? Good design is important, but sometimes things have to be changed, and ultimately a lot people just don't like change. Even if it's the best design in the world, somebody, somewhere will struggle with it being different. I think some "hand holding" as you suggest would be a good idea, but I'm not sure how that could be done in practice.

Then there are those of us at the opposite end of the age spectrum... I hated the look of iOS 7. Very hard on aging eyes. Replaced the wallpaper with a custom photo with my favorite background color for my text editor. Still can't find a way to get the high contrast, dark keypad back. Grrr. (expletive deleted), Apple - not everything needs to look like an hipster toy...

And then there are those of us who love the new design in iOS 7. And I know quite a few non-technical people who also think it's great.

UI changes, no matter how great, are always going to piss off someone. A lot of the time that someone probably has a very good reason to be pissed off. BUT the changes might also benefit a lot of people who aren't as vocal. We shouldn't hold back innovation because we're scared of pissing people off. Of course we also shouldn't change just for the sake of it.

[This isn't directed specifically at the parent but at the issue in general].

It could be said a different way. Design changes, no matter how shitty, are always going to have someone love them....

You have two peculiar observations brought about by one root cause and drifted off into the wrong theoretical cause.

The root cause is the traditional old style vs substance. This fits your observation that its harder to use, both to read and to keyboard. But its not marketed / designed as a tool to do anything, its a fashion accessory, so its irrelevant if its usable. What matters is if its shiny. That led you astray into the whole ageism anti-hipster thing. I also laugh at hipster kids, but the problem in this individual scenario has nothing to do with age.

Imagine if a hardware store released the iHammer and it was just like a conventional hammer, but cost much more so you could show off how rich you must be, and was painted blue, they made the hammer head pointy to be edgy and cool, had lace tied around the handle, and shipped it in a really cool origami clear plastic box. Anyone in search of a productive carpenters tool is going to be horribly disappointed and make fun of the iHammer, but thats not the point, the correct reason to buy a iHammer is to show off to their peers.

iDevices are no longer useful. That's OK. They're supposed to be fashion accessories, not useful devices.

> iDevices are no longer useful. That's OK. They're supposed to be fashion accessories, not useful devices.

Unfortunately the issue is the lack of a quality alternative. My best friend was an iPhone user, then switched to a Samsung Galaxy S2 because he wanted to be able to use is phone as a mass storage device, among other things. Eventually he switched back to the iPhone because the Galaxy was so unreliable. After less than a year, his phone would just silently shut off a couple times throughout the day. And he's far from the only person I know who's had Android reliability problems. My old HTC Incredible would stop responding to input a couple times a week until I yanked the battery.

All that said, I'm sticking with Android because I have a high tolerance for pain. iDevices may no longer be useful, but at least they work.

The iPhone is the best mobile option. I am much more attracted to Android than iOS (openness, the app store policies), but it just doesn't work as well as iOS. It's a bit cliche, but iPhone's just work.

My gf's iPhone5 started crapping out at 3 weeks old. My Galaxy S1 hung on just fine until I got the GS4 last month. Anecdotes on individual failures do not data make.

Samsung Galaxy phones do not have proper Android. You (and everyone else) wants a Nexus device but doesn't understand or care that they do.

Could you pack any more condescension in a post against happy iOS users? I happen to like ios7 because it is the most productive mobile OS available, for my needs. Which are not trivial.

I would disagree with your observation in that I never claimed that no needs can be fashion driven or that fashion is trivial, or that no one should be fashionable. Fashion and style are big business.

For analogy I have nothing against women who wear wedding dresses to a wedding instead of sweatpants and tee shirt, or people who market wedding dresses to women who want to wear them while getting married, it certainly fills a need for them very well, and profitably. The point I'm making is its pointless for a gang of construction workers to complain about women's wedding dresses, all "LOL they're selling wedding dresses how useless because the train will get stuck in the bulldozer hydraulics" and the other construction dude all "LOL yeah and how does she intend to get the cement stains out of that fabric anyway".

If your particular situation values style over usefulness more than any other device on the market, and some device fits your needs better than other devices on the market, hey, have fun with it.

Or maybe rephrased a basic product design goal is a fairly objective observation (although I may be wrong, but I don't think so). However, a (subjective) discussion about some users desires being trivial or non-trivial is way far away from that discussion.

Still very condescending.

I am making the claim that iDevices are not just a fashion accessory and in fact are a highly productive, useful mobile device for what people do with mobile devices. The success in the iPhone has been in large part due to its utility - the entire phone industry basically works like an iPhone does now.

Competing for customers remains a balancing act between increasing usability and the aesthetics/fashion of the device - clearly a gold iPhone has little to do with usability, but will sell heavily because it has a fashion edge in some quarters. But none of this would matter if the device wasn't still useful. My construction site superintendent step dad moves to an iPhone because it worked better than his BlackBerry. Rail yard workers I worked with are moving to rugged-case iPads over ruggedized PCs because the latter are difficult to use. Airline mechanics use them to log their daily activities and order parts. These folks don't necessarily move the needle of sales the way fashion does, but they wouldn't use an iPhone if it didn't help their job.

I'm sure all of those pilots using iPads in their flight bags are super concerned with how fashionable they look.

Have you tried "invert colors" under accessibility? Makes the color palette rather crazy but at least everything is dark.

I don't understand what light colours have to do with hipsters though, most UIs tend towards lighter colours, it's the old school unix coonsoles that preferred dark.

There is a setting that might help, although it does not seem to affect the keyboard much if at all: Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Increase Contrast

I have an 11 year old who is always bitching about Windows 8.

I'm not a parent, but do you think that is acceptable behavior? (Regardless of the product, service, or situation.)

I can't imagine wanting to be the teacher or classmate of said 11 year old if he/she is always "bitching" about stuff. And if that behavior continues into adulthood, I can't imagine being the boss or coworker of him/her. Such negative social qualities might be detrimental to his/her professional success and social well-being.

I wouldn't be able to say for certain until I have kids, but it might be beneficial to teach your 11 year old how to tactfully and constructively discuss the negative aspects of something rather than just "bitching" about it.

On a similar but different note, there were stories of children getting upset at the new look of iOS 7

This was a real concern for me. I made sure my children (19 months, 4 years old) could unlock my iPhone with iOS 7, before upgrading their iPad Mini.

Unfortunately I forgot about Spotlight Search, and the older one was complaining about it being missing after the upgrade (he knows he can find apps by typing in the first letter).

I showed him how to activate it but I can imagine many people never (re)discovering the feature, and possibly limiting the number of apps they install because they can't search for them easily.

I think Steve Jobs himself would have cried if he saw either IOS 7 or the iPhone 5C. One looks clunky and amateurish; the other is simply hideous and was designed specifically to increase margins while delivering an inferior product to the customer(sure its still well made, but most people would rather have an all metal case.)

Steve Jobs knew that both iOS 7 and the iPhone 5C were coming, and most likely a lot more.

http://www.ibtimes.com/steve-jobs-dies-leaves-plans-4-years-...

Did he know that they were going to be terrible? Given Apple's history of making attractive devices, I for one didn't see this coming.

Steve Jobs was at the helm for the Flower Power iMac, remember.

http://www.forevermac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/picture...

The Steve Jobs that left Apple as the most valuable company in the world had matured quite a bit from the one that released those.

People tend to learn from disastrous mistakes.

John Gruber voiced an interesting perspective on the "Jobs would have _____" syndrome surrounding Apple products (scroll to "Defining Innovation Down"): daringfireball.net/2013/09/the_iphone_5s_and_5c

Having been an initial iPhone Luddite, I remember the posts I'd read discussing the detractors of various models. The criticism of this update, and a number of others since Jobs died, have an incredibly similar tenor.

What I find inspirational is that by force of personality alone, Steve Jobs convinced so many customers that the products' let-downs were much less meaningful than those customers and proponents would have normally felt.

That is a truly remarkable skill.

I think the 5C would have driven him over the edge. It looks like it was made by Mattel or Hasbro (although it feels surprisingly sturdy. Salespeople should be doing everything they can to get it physically into customers hand). I actually really like iOS 7, although there are some rough edges that I bet would have bothered him (although I had to use an iPhone 1 for a week when my phone was stolen, and I think a lot of people forgot how clunky some of the software was). The only thing I don't like is that some buttons (mainly send and end calls) are extremely bright. It doesn't seem like it fits with iOS, plus it reminds me too much of Windows.

I never really bought in to the whole "Apple can't survive without Steve Jobs" thing. I think that they are perfectly capable of designing elegant, functional devices. Unfortunately, I don't think IOS 7 and the iPhone 5C are signs that the company is living up to its potential.

IOS now looks like it was slapped together in a hurry. I can't believe that this is the culmination of Jonny Ive's vision. He can do better. He has done better.

sometimes things have to be changed

Why? If a UI works for people, why does it have to be changed? That seems to me to be at least part of the problem: software designers think things have to be changed, when it's really just that they want to change them, for whatever reason, and don't stop to think about the impact.

a lot people just don't like change

A lot of people have things that work perfectly well for them and don't like having to re-learn their workflow whenever some software designer has a bright idea. I'm one of them: I still run a KDE 3 desktop on Linux because it works for me and I don't like having my UI messed with just because somebody designed some new eye candy.

This how I feel about every version of Skype (for OS X) since version 2.8.x. The Skype UI had two windows - one for contacts and one for conversations. This made it easy to tuck Skype in a small corner of your screen. I think starting at version 5 they switched to one giant window and the community, pretty unanimously thought it was one of the worst UIs they had ever used (see this blog post: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/). The change seemed completely unnecessary and made things very non intuitive. If I myself had trouble using it, I think it must have been even worse for people who do not use computers so often. Indeed many people reverted back to 2.8. I used 2.8 up until a few months ago when Skype finally decided to drop video support for it.

I think the newest version of Skype does let you break things into new windows, but to me it seems that it should be the default.

My main point is: the UI was already great, it didn't need any changes.

I'm still using 2.8 - if the other side cares about video, we'll use a google hangout, but skype's never getting upgraded again. Man was that a disaster.

There can be numerous of reasons why something 'has' to be changed. These changes are not always justified from some perspectives of course. If these perspectives represent the majority and also on the long run, something's wrong and perhaps that is your point. But sometimes, change is for the better, for the majority, especially on the long run. Often, with software design, you reach local optima, and to get further (more user friendly, more flexible, incorporating new or changed features, adapt changes in hardware, or things happening outside, etc), you'll need to move away from the sweet spot the majority settled with to get to another (hopefully better adjusted) local optimum.

Finding examples of cases where this did not work are no argument against all changes.

And as far as people not liking change. This is not only about re-learning. Change on itself is often met with tough resistance. And this resistance is often rationally hard to justify. Your example may or may not be like that (I don't have enough perspective to tell), but perhaps re-learning would have been more than compensated by the amount of time saved due to new features.

sometimes, change is for the better

Of course this is always possible in general terms. But I was talking about a specific set of cases: redesigns of UIs that already work and that already have a huge base of existing users who will have to relearn what they know. In my experience, it's extremely rare for that kind of change to be "for the better".

you'll need to move away from the sweet spot the majority settled with to get to another (hopefully better adjusted) local optimum.

And in the process, you will have to move through a "pit" of UI suck where lots of people have significantly worse productivity for a significant period of time. And for what?

Finding examples of cases where this did not work are no argument against all changes.

I didn't argue against all changes; as noted above, I was talking specifically about software UI changes that force existing users to re-learn things for no good reason.

perhaps re-learning would have been more than compensated by the amount of time saved due to new features.

How much time saved? And how long before that savings pays back the huge cost of the switch, per the above?

And can these numbers even be measured anyway? Sure, Google can measure to the millisecond how long it takes for you to move the mouse from one place to another, and no doubt they have numbers to show that the new GMail UI shaves critical milliseconds off certain common operations. But can they measure the frustration caused by changes like this? Can they measure the emails that don't even get written because people get fed up with their new UI? Can they measure the cost of keeping people within their walled garden?

This problem is not limited to Google, of course; I think it's endemic in the software UI world. I think software UIs are like fashions: changes are largely driven not by functionality but by an arms race for users' attention.

If your competitor's UI changes and yours doesn't, soon enough you'll stop making money.

why?

Because the UI consultant said so. The A/B testing clearly showed their proposed design was preferred by 99% of users over a blank black screen.

Because it's a web application. In the old days, you could use that old version of said software until your motherboard gave out 15 years later. However, today there is only ONE version of Gmail. Everyone has to use that version. Hence one person's "New Feature" will be another person's reason to cry. The cost of keeping X versions of Gmail in production is just too prohibitive.

If this is true, then to me it's a reason not to use web applications. (And I don't, for the most part; I still run KDE 3 on Linux, and use KMail to read email. The only web applications I use routinely are for things like paying bills, where I have no choice but to use the web UI for the bank or credit card company or whatever. And every so often those change and I have to re-learn things for no good reason.)

How much is the cost of updating the old interface once in a while when the backend API's change? They don't need to keep improving to versions in parallel, just keep the old one working is good enough.

> Good design is important

The new GMail UI is most emphatically not good design.

I think it's easy to underestimate or fail to appreciate the huge number of people who learned to use computers by rote. I have more than one relation who uses GMail by first typing "gmail" in the Google search bar. For them, just moving the send button would at least cause a hiccup in their workflow. Any UI optimization is a show-stopper.

By that logic, we should freeze all Software UI where it is. Any UI change is going to run into some level of change aversion, no matter how brilliant it is. Software makers have to balance that with the need to keep innovating on a piece of software - otherwise someone else will just do it and make them obsolete.

the need to keep innovating

Why is there a need to keep innovating on the UI for sending and receiving email? Why isn't this a solved problem? Why can't the innovators move on to some new problem whose solution would create much more value?

I suspect it's because "Delivered a new UI experience for Gmail" sounds great at review time. People get rewarded for delivering features and a new UI for an existing product is relatively easy vs. trying to create a solution for a whole new problem.

Unfortunately I don't see an easy answer to this.

Or maybe because it's a huge, intensely competitive market where multiple top-tier companies are trying to draw users from each other: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo. You can't stand still and expect your user base to keep growing. You might make your current users unhappy sometimes, but the goal is to keep getting new users, not just hold onto the ones you have.

the goal is to keep getting new users, not just hold onto the ones you have

I understand that this is the current goal of the companies you named, but, to put it bluntly, why should I care? My goal is to not have to deal with change just for the sake of change, or because some company wants to keep capturing new users. (Which is why, as I've said in other posts in this thread, I don't use GMail, don't use MS or Apple products, don't keep upgrading my Linux desktop just because somebody invented a new UI, etc.)

Also, "keep getting new users" isn't a sustainable goal anyway. Facebook already has more than a billion users; they don't have too much further to go before everyone that has Internet access at all (apart from a few outliers like me) will have a Facebook account. What do they do then?

You're kidding, right?

We could also just keep using lynx for web browsing. It worked fine.

We could also just keep using lynx for web browsing. It worked fine.

I'll gladly admit that having a browser that does graphics is a huge improvement over a browser that only displays text, like lynx. But browsers have been supporting graphics since what, 1995? Earlier?

Since graphical browsers appeared, IMO, there has been exactly one UI innovation in browsers that was worth the effort to re-learn things: the Chrome UI, that basically got rid of the UI except for the address/search bar and the browser window itself. I'm fine with having to re-learn where all the menu options are if I need them, in exchange for that simplification. But that happened in what, 2008?

Of course there have been plenty of changes behind the scenes in browsers, such as security fixes, support for HTML 5 and updates to Javascript, etc. None of those affect the UI, and I'm not talking about those kinds of changes. I'm talking specifically about changes to the UI that force people to re-learn things for no good reason.

> I have more than one relation who uses GMail by first typing "gmail" in the Google search bar.

How you do it? I feel like typing gmail in chrome versus the url is less error prone and is more easy.

> Seeing her cry about this made me change the way I think about what some users go through when they experience unexpected UI changes.

I can understand. My mother is her 60s and is now a Ubuntu user, has broadband, uses Skype & Gmail.

It took her a long time to get used to it. It is funny she has never used Microsoft or Apple or other computer before on a long term level. She thought, Windows for example was a very user "unfriendly".

But back to the complexity. I remember when she was learning it was very frustrating both for her and me. I think it is easy, and she didn't. Now the other day there was a post on HN about how to start a Boeing airliner. I at that moment understood what it is like being faced with a new interface with new rules and paradigms. If I had start a commercial aircraft I would start crying too probably.

Then of course every time Google or Ubuntu messes with their interface, it causes her and me (having to re-teach her) considerable stress.

Sometimes I think corporations go through re-design just because they can. Like there is an timer set to go off every 6 months and designers, new bosses, CEOs all see it go ding and say "aha, let's redesign it". Sometimes it doesn't make it better, it just makes it different even if it was already pretty good.

That's why you have a well worn checklist you use to start a jetliner. It's complex, so they wrote it down and that's how you do it to make sure you don't miss a step.

Reminds me of when I was showing my mom how to use a new piece of software and she opened a notebook and wrote it down step by step. That's how she starts her airliners. Now if only documentation was not considered an afterthought these days.

I have a particularly common word as a gmail address (not common like a grammatical article - think more like "experience@gmail..." or something like that). I know the UI's gotten bad in a usability way by the increasing frequency of mistaken emails sent my way because people keep inputting their subject in the "To" field.

> She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it.

Yeah, the send button used to be in a horrible place in Gmail. Nowhere close to the editor, and oddly detached from the compose area. I always had trouble finding it.

Thankfully they fixed it in the UI update the author's complaining about. Now it's where I'd expect it to be...attached to the email composer.

I said it before and I got downvoted to hell, but I'll say it again. Just because those of those of us on HN can deal with these UI changes does not mean that the vast majority of the public can. We ARE the minority, and when designing systems we should expect people to be computer illiterate. I am the computer-go-to-guy whenever something goes wrong or family members/friends need help, and ANY UI change always leads to difficulty. Something as small has the UI change from IE7-8-9 was enough to trigger a "how do I use this thing?" every single time. Same when MS Office introduced the ribbon.

It's the reason Apple have done so well - they didn't invent anything new which hadn't already been done, they just added better UI that appealed to the masses.

I have to say, I agree with most of what is written in that blog, I've gotten used to some of the changes now but still a lot of the time keep looking around to see where the hell something has gone (the attach files expands out to reveal more options, why the hell is add URL link under attach options?)

Ah... but neither Google nor Apple care much about customer feedback on their UI's. Google will have an abandoned forum thread you can complain about defects on that will never be read. Apple will simply delete the forum thread to keep everything starchy. Either way users either find a way around the problem, stop using technology, or cling to their Outlook 1998 client.

Actually, we care deeply about customer feedback and several of us on the product team read the threads on the product forums personally, especially when there is vocal feedback. We don't necessarily act on everything, of course. With a product that operates at global scale we have a huge responsibility to make sure we are making optimizations that improve Gmail for as many users as possible, and the only way to do that is to rely on metrics and surveys that capture the entire user base. Otherwise we would be, by definition, changing a UI used by hundreds of millions in response to a vocal, non-representative minority. Basically we use the product forums and social media to figure out of there are trends or issues that we should be concerned about, but then always validate those issues with real data before taking action.

Thanks for the reply Jason. Many of the movements of the Google properties have been toward the light over the last two years and it certainly is a very difficult task for the Google peeps. Props to them.

Alas, as a keen WebApp dev myself, I have found myself having to Google for how to do tasks I once did easily. Such searches eventually uncover the highly counter intuitive means to do the previously simple thing (via someone's blog post), or reveal that the feature has been dropped from the new and improved version. Such issues are not a subjective matter of color choice or icon design, but the reduction of functionality and confounding of user interaction.

Largely Google wins the efforts to improve their products, but I've seen a half dozen such failings in the last year that I am surprised managed to ship. Hopefully their batting average continues to improve.

The answer in this case is for her to use a local e-mail client. That way, updates are entirely under her control.

I know it's not perfect, but little ever is.

This has not been my experience.

Installing a mail client, debugging weird IMAP/POP/SMTP issues that come up from time-to-time - not fun.

My mom already knows (for some definition of 'knows') how to use a web browser to view web pages. Using it for email is much easier.

Also, it's easy for me to login into her account and see what happened when she said her mail didn't go through or whatever.

The best was my mother-in-law finding out that her contacts were all lost when her Outlook calendar got corrupted. She didn't even use the Outlook calendar.

And of course, because she didn't have a hotmail account, her contacts were stored locally, so there was no backup.

Some local e-mail clients update automatically. Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, rolled out a new version with major interface changes automatically.

I watched my mother attempt to deal with Windows 8 and she was quite confused by it. What makes it worse is that Microsoft (and most others) are now actively trying to get users to sign up to things they don't need to and make this the 'easy' path.

My mother is smart enough to know not to randomly sign up to things but this means she now has to try and navigate the 'advanced' path through a UI.

Skype on Windows 8 is a UX abomination. Whenever I get a call and it's ringing, I can never find where to pick up and miss the call. Every time. I'm sure I'll figure it out one of these days.

I normally use linux but thought i'll try w8. Installed it on dual boot and played around. Wanted to restart it so I could boot to linux. Had to google how to shut down w8.

Don't you know you just hover the mouse in the magic spot and then move it up quickly when the magic charms bar appears? ;-) I am fine with Win 8 in desktop mode but every once in awhile, I'll click to open a file and be thrown into tablet mode and then you're in a different world.

Whoever thought 'hover the mouse in the magic spot' was a good UI advancement needs to be shot, repeatedly.

I think it's safe to say that if Steve Ballmer thought it was a bad idea, then it wouldn't be that way. All of his post "retirement" statements seem to be made in the mood of a man who didn't leave voluntarily, so he was forced to walk the plank over this and an accumulation of mistakes.

Metro largely threw discoverability out the windows.

(ps: I had the same problem)

Outlook mail also sucks totally. It's quite impossible to find some of the key buttons with it, like the send button. I have complained about it, but as far as I know, there's no fix for the problem.

https://plus.google.com/106938703242944328523/posts/AU5F7oeV...

I have added red marks to the screenshot, so it's bit easier to find those buttons.

That looks like a Linux-specific rendering issue - it certainly looks nothing like that for me.

Not that I'm saying that it's OK for them to ignore the problem, but the issue you're seeing is not experienced by almost all users.

What browser version are you using?

is your zoom or DPI set to non-default?

The problem with hand-holding is how many times have you created good looking prompts to introduce a new feature and then find that the client just clicks through them ignoring what was written?

The answer is every single time. They do not read prompts ever.

Therefore, prompts are the wrong way to do it.

Correct!

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