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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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