“Fresh” vs. “Familiar”: how aggressive are users to redesign

You often hear from project team members (or their management): "We need a fresh design." This usually puts the design of a redesign on the wrong basis, with the wrong goals and strategy.

As a rule, a new design will be worse simply because it is new and thus breaks user expectations. The best strategy is to play on acquaintance and bet on the existing knowledge of users about how the system works.

Why users want a fresh design

')
You look at the thing all day, all year. Of course, you think the user interface looks backward. Count the number of spent hours that you had to spend on your own design. If you worked in the same design team for several years, this watch probably reaches thousands . In contrast, your typical user probably spent only a few hours looking at your design over the past few years.

Remember the Jacob Act on the experience of Internet users: users spend most of their time on other sites. People usually spend no more than 2-3 minutes on the site, so even if they visit your site daily, they would work with the site for only 30 hours over 2 years. Even loyal users will spend less than 5 hours on your site every year. With so little time spent looking at the design, users will not get tired of it in the near future.

Why do users want "Familiar" design

The most important reason? Users don't care about design for their own sake , they just want to get their way and get out. Normal people do not like to sit at their computers. They will better watch football, take a walk with the dog - they will simply do something else. Using a computer, the level is considered slightly higher than the garbage disposal.

When people visit websites or use applications, they do not spend their time analyzing or admiring design. They focused on tasks, content, as well as their own data or documents. Therefore, people love design when they know the features and can immediately find what they need. That is, they love the familiar design. In fact, if at any time you start a redesign, get ready for the flow of angry letters from angry users. This is a law of nature that users hate change. They will complain every time you move something or otherwise change their ability to do what they always do.

(If users complain about a redesign it’s not necessary that this is bad, if a new design is really more convenient, the number of satisfied users will increase. Customer complaints are not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they are just a reason to avoid changing the design just to "Refresh.")

Frequently used interfaces

If you are running an intranet, developing applications, or you have a very popular site, users can actually accumulate more than a few minutes impact on your user interface per week. In such cases, you might think that users will be outraged by a design change - but no.

People who regularly use the interface have become experienced users and skilled work dominates their user experience. If we compare design for novice users and experienced users, it is distinguished by the relative importance of key attributes of convenience, such as learning and efficiency. The more people rely on qualified performance, the more they depend on the availability of routine automatic behavior.

Thus, users with a high frequency of use prefer a familiar design. Ultimately, the difference between a team of designers and users comes down to the comparison of looking or using . You look at the design again and again, and you endlessly argue about small elements. Users can use the same features again, but their thoughts are all in the task they perform. Since users are focused on something external, the design doesn't bother them so much.
When to update the design in any case

As a rule, it is better to develop a user interface with gentle changes , rather than offering a completely new design. Therefore, I strongly recommend making the design correct in the first place, before launching, so that it can live for several years with minor updates. Before releasing something to customers, use methods such as fast iterative design and paper prototypes to carefully study the design space and polish usability.

This contrasts with the simple “hang something on the board” approach to see where else to stick something. Indeed, some people are in favor of releasing the best guesses, because beauty on the Internet is something that you can always change if you are mistaken.

This is true, but you will be unpopular because

• You will mistreat users by exposing them to design flaws, which you could fix in just a few days after prior usability testing.
• You push users away , which makes them suffer a lot from the changes that we know they hate.

In general, do it right, and then change slowly.
Nevertheless, there are two cases in which it is advisable to use a more radical approach:

• If you have almost no users and expect that a significant improvement in design will rapidly increase the number of users. In this case, the business losses from current users' dissatisfaction are small enough to take care of them. Of course, it is not a fact that you will really be able to attract a much larger audience. Remember the old adage: better tit in the hand than a crane in the sky. If you are sure that there are millions of users in that dense one more often, you may not want to go there.
• If your old design has gradually evolved over the years, as a result, the user interface has become too confusing and lost all sense of a single conceptual structure.

As an example to the second paragraph, then let's look at Microsoft Office. The package was introduced in 1989 as additional packages of old stand-alone applications like Word (since 1983) and Excel (since 1984). By 2000, the basic user interface architecture was 17 years old, and MS Office was cracking at the seams.

I often complained that the old approach of a confusing set of features thrown together and an increasingly complex set of menus and dialog boxes made it difficult for users to find most of them. Although I criticized the growing usability issues in MS Office, I also said that if I were Bill Gates, I would not have gone to a radical redesign immediately. I thought that although the new design would be better for users, it could be bad for business: it is easier to sell additional updates than a completely new interface. Of course, Office 2003 comes with a slightly cleaned interface, relatively to the same 20 years experience.

Basically, the old design was really old, and a large amount of increased functionality required to completely change the architecture of the user interface. Now, having a new user interface for two years, there is no way for me to go back to Microsoft Office 2003 or to its predecessors. New design is the best. When it was launched there were a lot of complaints: users do not like changes, and the new user interface takes time to get used to.

So, if your existing design is filled with clutter on bolts of features that need new architecture, then it’s best to stay with the familiar design that users prefer. And avoid the temptation to go with a new design that only you will appreciate.