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No, UI redesigns are a waste of time for the user.

They are very effective at getting the executives who sponsor them promoted, because they look great in a PowerPoint. The actual customer of an executive is the finance department, because they are the ones who actually control the headcount & budgets that an executive needs, and they are usually not the user. How the product works is often invisible to someone who is not a daily user, and financial analysts often don't have time to be power users in all the products they are evaluating. How it looks is very visible. Therefore, when deciding which projects to fund, they are often biased toward shiny.

Notice that founder-run companies, and ones that are too small to have normal corporate functional separation, usually don't invest in visual redesigns unless the existing UI is really bad. Big corporations do it continuously.

Strongly agree.

No UI is really intuitive enough that there isn't a formal or informal learning and even training cost to it. Then the redesign invariably finds a new way to hide the controls (hamburger menus, ... menus, gosh knows what else).

As a counterpoint, when you change the insides, no one notices: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...

>And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. “Look at Calc, same as it always was.”

If nobody notices massive technical internal improvements, that tells me that what was improved wasn't of great importance to the user in the first place. Perhaps those technical improvements were a waste of time, but perhaps those technical improvements benefited development without adversely impacting users. That would be an enormous "win" in my book.

> Anyway, my point is that—whether you like it or not—if you don’t change the UI, nobody notices. That’s why so much effort is spent on new UI.

I think this is wrong on two counts. First, if the change you made to the business logic really improved the things that users value, they'll absolutely notice even if the UI doesn't change.

Second, that comment implies that one way or another, a user-noticeable change must happen. It could very well be that the software is ideal for its user base as-is and no change at all is preferable to change for change's sake.

"Second, that comment implies that one way or another, a user-noticeable change must happen. It could very well be that the software is ideal for its user base as-is and no change at all is preferable to change for change's sake."

To quote the users: "but why should I pay for bug fixes?"

User-noticeable change is essential.

Reddit comes to mind. Who knows how much money they spent on their redesign with users hating it and actively choosing to use their old site design YEARS after they rolled out their new design.

I also run a site and when I ask people what I should improve next, nearly no one says design, even when the design is clearly not very good.

An example of a site that never changes is Craigslist. I can't even recall the last time it looked different. It's probably overdue for a redesign even.

To be fair Reddit needs a redesign. The existing UI is pretty good on desktop but sucks with smaller displays.

Of course their last redesign was so bad that they are already working on a new one: https://sh.reddit.com/. It seems better so far, but lets hope it ships before they turn off old.reddit.com

> but sucks with smaller displays.

That's the system working as intended. Why would they invest in making the site better on smaller displays (i.e. mobile) when their priority is to get you to use the app? From the normal not long term enough business perspective, doing so could only cannabalize those conversions to the app that would have otherwise happened. And conversion rate from web to app is almost certainly a explicitly tracked metric.

I don't think it is. If this was the main goal they would have just done nothing. Instead they rolled out a design which sucks for both desktop as well as maintaining shittiness on mobile..
He's right. The design should be integrated on small piece by small piece. You can have an overall vision. But don't change it all at once.
I agree. One piece of advice I like to give is, "Change only the one worst thing." Figure out what you (or, preferably, your users) hate most. Change only that one thing. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is a mostly fair and accurate take, but there is an element of cherry picking here. There are countless UI updates that you don’t notice or barely notice. When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.
> When the change is subtle and/or a smart improvement, no one complains.

All UI changes bring some amount of pain to existing users. People will accept that pain if the benefit of the change is greater than the cost, no matter how large or small the change is.

The thing that's become common is for UI changes to happen that bring little, if any, benefit to the user.

Though there are sometimes good reasons to do so, company brand (logo, typography, name, etc.) refreshes often come across as an employment program for designers. There are legit reasons--e.g. working better on mobile or reflecting that a company doesn't do what it used to do any longer. But I see the sort of redesign where a company subtly adjusted the hue of its logo and I'm like "Why?"
My take is that this happens because the industry at large, especially web, does not treat engineers as proper engineers, and instead makes engineers do all sorts of other work. This leads to the type of engineering work that accumulates a lot of damage relatively quickly and needs to be rewritten over and over again.

The ideal engineering solution, even for UIs, should be something that is abstracted properly, written only once, and then accumulates new features without any friction whatsoever. The new features rest on top of the platform seamlessly, giving users more options with no downsides.

A good UI, imho, is one that users can configure, it only adds new things and never take out existing features, and is robust, reliable and responsive. This is a serious technical challenge and most organizations are not setup in a way to solve this problem properly without the solution deteriorating and needing a rewrite... and yes in part it's because on the business side there is no perceptin that this is actually needed and so it is deemed easier to just rewrite and build something new every time.

>A good UI, imho, is one that users can configure

It is better if UI works good out of the box. Of course, it is impossible to adapt to everyone's preferences, but configuration should be not too complicated, otherwise most users will not configure anything

That would just be the default configuration. Eventually almost everyone wants to customize according to their own needs, and this adds a lot of value.
> Eventually almost everyone wants to customize according to their own needs,

Citation needed.

> Do we have concrete evidence that what we are doing will provide benefit to the company or users, or just feel that it would be better if the UI was redesigned?

This isn't specific to UI redesigns, or even to software in general. People have been doing things "just because" since before the discovery of fire.

Very often it just seems to be a rat race to have the most "trendy" UI. I'm not sure how it works internally, but trends change all the time and I think it would be in the best interest of a company like Google or Meta to have a "modern" style.
We really have two sorts of software: the immutable types that developers depend on to behave exactly as they did forty years ago, and then the slop relegated to the general public that seems to need a redesign every 5 years, much like the inside of a grocery store.
Is it bad that I almost feel nostalgia at those old spambots in the comments? Ironically it's one of the few types of posts i don't think you could get an LLM to output.
> This is not a redesign, but good design

The author asks about smooth redesign and gradual deployment. I guess like google docs do.

Getting a new car with a new design is a waste of time and resources. What is new after all? You have all you need. A box with engine, wheels and steering wheel.

I am curious, what car model and from what year this gentleman uses? I hope everything around him is only made by following his advice and principle.

There is a problem in UX/UI design. Twofold problem.

Developers hate to work on frontend implementation, and designers have mediocre knowledge about their craft and refuse to think objectively.

Both of the problems can be solved with actual effort in education.

Instead, big corps are wasting money and energy to replace all of them. AI will solve all of this by removing capitalism, human expertise, and design. Right?

Sidenote. Today, I have tried seven times to update my Mac Mini. After hours of fight with Apple logic, I give up. What's going on there?

> Developers hate to work on frontend implementation

I know a lot of developers who strongly prefer front-end work. I know a lot that hate it. A bit like how some developers prefer greenfield development and others prefer maintenance work.

I don't think it's supportable to make a blanket declaration that all developers have the same tastes or interests.

>I don't think it's supportable to make a blanket declaration that all developers have the same tastes or interests.

Let's make a poll. Why, when CSS is advanced as never before, devs are using Tailwind?

You're talking web development specifically here. I was talking about front-end work generally.
Can anyone here explain why YouTube (namely the mobile interface) goes through a total redesign every 1-2 years? Is it just to earn some unknown manager another promotion? I'm getting really sick of it at this point.
Pretty much that, yep.

There's very little productive new ground to grow on if you're working on YouTube.

There's existing glaring site problems, but they're on purpose and ideologically driven (shorts, placebo dislike, subscriptions mean nothing) so no one is going to touch them. It's politically safer and more advantageous to mess with the UI and irritate all the users every couple years.

But what about fixing the obvious, common, and annoying bugs in the web version? That doesn't count as an accomplishment?
the bugs in the web version are intentional to get you to download the app. you should be smart enough to figure this out by now
What ideology is driving this?
I assume OP didn't mean that a single overarching ideology was driving all if these changes, but rather that each of them individually is ideologically driven (and therefore immune to questioning). They all seem to be directly counter to the end-user's desires but are off-limits to redesign.
This is just what happens when groups of people work together.
It's similar to the "shipping your org chart" problem. Constant redesigns means you are shipping your employee performance review and incentive structure.
it's called resume driven develobment
I think people are being a bit cynical with that take, although it's not completely unfounded. There are other factors like new technologies that are overall better, and also restructuring of teams due to people leaving and/or layoffs. What you end up with is a codebase or parts of the codebase that accumulate "damage" (or increase in entropy), and sometimes the easiest thing to do is to start something from scratch again.

So yeah sometimes the path of least resistance is building something new.

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.
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.
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