People are also ignoring the importance of competition.
Your website is dated and doesn’t have the features of the one from the new guys? Say good-bye to your business.
Companies change their software/websites to keep up with their competition. If they kept everything the same, the competition would soon kill them.
You’re making two mistakes here. The first is assuming that the average user is someone who’s been using it for a long time and is comfortable with the existing interface. But that’s not true of very much software at all. The average user of something that’s seeing 100x more use since a decade before is not the person who was using it 10 years ago. It’s not even the person who was using it 5 years ago, or 2. The average user is someone who’s been using it since it had half the use it did now (about 18 months, for this example). For lots of software you can measure that in months or single-digit years. Generally only really technically-focused and specialized software has an average user who’s been using it for a decade or more.
And you can’t just design for the average user now. You have to design for the average user over the life of your product, which means that for almost any piece of software, the average user you’re designing for is someone who’s just starting to use it.
Clinging to an old interface that has lots of problems because a small fraction of users is comfortable with the interface is a recipe for being outdated and outcompeted and just not working well. And you can either trust me (or do a little reading), but our interface paradigms are terrible!
Really really bad. I absolutely cannot overemphasize how bad they are. Most of us are used to them, so we don’t dwell on how bad they are, but anyone who develops software and talks to users realizes just how easy it is to fall into How many times have you known someone who accidentally deleted a bunch of important stuff. Who spent hours working on something only to have it vanish in a puff of poorly-designed user interface?
Here’s an example that still plagues all modern OSes that I know of: The dreaded pop-up dialog that steals focus. Have you ever been typing something and had a warning dialog flash on screen just as you hit Enter? And you just clicked OK to whatever it said. Shit! What did I just approve?! I have no idea. This is just terrifyingly unsafe and awful, and yet it’s quite common. And in order to fix it we’ll have to fundamentally change how some of those interfaces work.
The second problem is that you can’t always fix bad design by improving efficiency. If the design is bad enough that 5% of them end up lost and contacting support, or confused and buying the wrong thing… well, your phone bank and support budget just caught on fire when your user base increased 100x.
Sure, they don’t now, because those controls have been refined and standardized for over 100 years. The average car driver has been driving cars for decades, and there aren’t that many more people out there who are going to be driving in the near future, so we don’t need to redesign things to make it easier for them.
But the first cars were steered with a tiller. And they went maybe 10mph. At some point, someone realized that things needed to change.
We reach that point with software all the time, because the underlying hardware and use is changing way faster. If you took someone who knew how to drive a Camry and put them in an F1 dragster, you think they’d be right at home? No need to learn anything new? That’s the pace of change that we face with computers every 5 years.
…the other thing to consider is that opinion is quite simply a subjective thing. I love the new google maps. I prefer Metro Windows 8 on my desktop. I love the office Ribbon. Someone complained about the usps website so I clicked on it, and it looks incredibly efficient and well designed considering everything its expected to do.
The Dope has a tradition of being “quite contrarian.” I’d put it to people here that companies change their software and their websites because they think they are making them better. And in the vast majority of cases and for the vast majority of people I think that they are succeeding.
I’m a software engineer who has worked on multiple top-500 web companies and I think this happens more than it should. As soon as a company rolls out a new design the designers either start working on a new one or they get fired.
But there are a lot of other reasons already stated: new designs work better with the increase of users; gotta copy what competitors are doing; some re-designs really are better.
There are some technical reasons for this. At some point there is a new platform for development and everything is forced to use it. So they have to re-write what was done before and put it on the new platform. Generally they can’t keep it exactly the same, or they feel the trend is better to change it. Change always upsets someone, you can’t get around that.
The other is the NIH Factor, the Not Invented Here Factor. This means that whatever someone else had done, the new person in charge of it tossed it, because they don’t want to look like they are just tending store for the previous person’s work. They want to put their on stamp on it, so they can call it their own. This category in my opinion, needs to be fired, because that’s a waste of company resources and puts the project in jeopardy and greatly inconveniences the users of the software. It also can damage the company’s reputation for delivering a quality product. The thing is, the company will never admit to it being a NIH Factor to the end-user.
Actually if you change the design so that the average user accomplishes his job with fewer clicks, you can handle more traffic without changing the underlying design. And maybe convert more visits to sales.
This. 1000 times this.
I don’t know if I work on and with and use different software than the OP (and some of the subesquent posters) but to use the dresser analogy - it’s more like you went to IKEA, picked up three different dressers and decided to do your own IKEA hack and combine them into a single unit. But first, you got out the whiskey; then you got out the power tools. Now, you now have a … something. And it mostly doesn’t not work. It holds clothes, but the top drawer sticks unless you pull it a certain way, the handles don’t all match (some drawers don’t even have handles), and if you put anything too heavy into the bottom drawer, it’ll fall through. On the positive side, it has the unexpected benefit of clearing up your clutter problem because the top isn’t exactly level, so things tend to slide off of it. Over time, you’ll get used to hanging your jeans in the closet and you’ll know how to open the drawer so that it doesn’t jam and for the most part it works. But deep down, you know that you’re going to need to get a real dresser someday.
Or at least that’s why I see the software upgrades. The software gets released before it’s ready (for a variety of reasons), the competition releases something with enough additional features that changes need to be made to keep up, and/or the market changes so that potential new customers aren’t going to buy it unless it’s more and better.
You can’t sell the the same thing to people who already have it. If you cant sell things, you have no income to exist as a company. It’s the same with many other products - you try to persuade your existing customers to buy a new one of something they already have.
For an example of a company that does it very effectively (that is, enticing its customers to buy a new one of something they already have): Apple.
Yup. I don’t work for a megcorp, just small county gov. The GIS web site that was working for years and years had to be updated because the server side changed dramatically. Software that was no longer supported, new servers on our end and sometimes hours of downtime. Both my boss and I knew that one of these times it simply was not going to come back.
I built a new GIS site, and all is going swimmingly. The testing phase is predictable though. I had both sites running internally to our organization asking for people to use the new site, not the old site and give recommendations and feed back. Of course the old site was working fine, so very few used the new site. Why should they?
We flipped the switch, and there where a few little glitches, and a couple of larger ones. I don’t think that’s unusual when you have a broad base of users. It’s to be expected.
This is why I still use Excel 2003. Now I’ll admit that there are a few things in the 2003 program that could be better. But enough to learn a whole new interface? Nope, not to me.
And actually, I did some rather thorough checking of excel 2007 and 2010, and found that none of the things that I felt could have been better in 2003 had been changed for the better in these new versions.
You cant do easily do that forever though. If you exchange files with anyone else, you’ll eventually find they send you a spreadsheet you can’t open (it happens now with some 2013 spreadsheets opening in excel 2003, even with the compatibility pack).
Further down the line, you may find you can’t even install office 2003 on some future version of Windows.
Staying behind on your favourite version of something usually results in greater pain later. When ypu find yourself with no option but to upgrade, it’s a bigger and harder step to make.
I’m not saying the pain of constant change (esp. change that you didnt ask for) is a good thing, only that change is reality, and hiding from it often hurts more in the end.
That said, skipping a version in which major changes first appear is sometimes a good thing. The transition from office 2003 to 2007 is harder than going from 2003 to 2010 or later, because the ‘File’ menu was replaced by the Office Button in 2007, but went back to being the File menu in 2010. (Plus the online help for office 2007 was really shitty when it was new)
Likewise, skipping Windows 8 is going to be a more comfortable transition for many people, because the Start menu went away, then came back.
I agree with the planned obsolescence and make-work by website designers reasons, plus the unreasoning fear that users/consumers will conclude that the company is an old fogey who’s not with it, because their website hasn’t changed in the last year.
The leader in unnecessary, non-useful and downright irritating software changes is probably iTunes. You could have added all those features and changes that iTunes has made over the years with minimal changes to the interface, but Apple sold itself on the idea that consumers would think it was old hat without them.
It’s basically the same as updating the Campbell’s soup can, only lots more complicated and annoying.
*top offender for me recently is sports illustrated.com, which went from a highly usable format to a buggy mess, for no perceptible reason other than gotta-be-new.
A car will eventually wear out; a piece of software won’t. So a software company that sold a perfect program would never get repeat business. Thus to stay in business they have to continually “improve” it. Maybe we would have been better off if the software companies only rented the software and we had to pay an annual fee to continue using it. I understand that mainframe software did work that way (at least some did). And I have heard that possibility raised recently for our current computers.
But I would be happier with a stable platform that I had to pay a reasonable annual fee for. Of course, I would expect regular security upgrades, but I get them anyway.
There is no such thing as perfect software. The day it was released Support would start receiving requests for enhancements. And this software would have to rely on no 3rd party software that requires updates. Software that stands still will become a bit player in the market.
Another reason there’s no such thing as perfect software is that the world changes, and this means the software has to meet new requirements - pivot tables in Excel, for example, have much richer functionality in recent versions of Office, meaning people can analyse their data in ways that before, they would have needed database programming skills for.
Other new features are just improvements on previous iterations - again, using Excel as an example: conditional formatting is much improved in recent versions - for instance, allowing values to be formatted out of a gradient of colours that automatically knows about the min/max values in the range.
The new ESPN web site. Why they changed it I have no idea. The new one sucks :(.
The two most dreaded things in making companies worse are consultants and focus groups.
You bring in a bunch of idiots with nothing better to do, ask them a bunch of questions they don’t really understand and you get “data”. Next thing you know, everything is changed for the worse.
Enough about consultants now.
Companies almost hire outside consultants for big bucks. The consultants know they can never say “Everything is great, leave it just as it is.” since the company is going to wonder why they wasted all that money on them and never hire them again. So they suggest a bunch of stupid changes for change sake.
And the company has to follow thru else the upper management is going to wonder why middle management wasted money getting consultant recommendations and not act on them.
Nobody remembers instances where the interface/useability of a website improved, only those where it declined. Just like nobody remembers when the train/bus/plane was on-time, only when it was late. Hence “the train is always late!” and “tweaked websites always suck!” :smack:
Yay, someone got to it before I did! I understand entirely why they did it - responsive design, multiple devices, etc. But the bottom line is that it’s a significant downgrade for most of my use cases. Same thing for Google Maps, actually - I don’t hate the new one the way some people do, but it 100% takes me more time and effort to do the same types of things versus the old version.
This stuff is entirely on designers, though - software devs in that kind of situation are just doing what they’re asked for.