"people always complain about UI changes at first and then they get used to it" i'm going to break into your house and put all your important stuff you use every day in random drawers and see how you like it. i'm gonna hide your phone in the towel cupboard. i'll put all your spoons in the fridge. all writing utensils are now stored under a floorboard that i've drawn a pencil on (in very light pencil so you can't actually see it)
if you want your software to be a part of users' everyday lives then it has to be reliable and predictable. you can't just change the entire shape of it on a whim no matter how much better you think it is. make small changes slowly or leave it the fuck alone. a UI overhaul is rarely a good idea because even if it really is "better" you are straining the fragile trust of your userbase by throwing them unexpectedly into HEY LEARN A NEW THING when it is fucking thursday or whatever and they are busy or maybe have an urgent message to send to someone. it's disrespectful. it's a breach of common decency. you shouldn't overhaul your entire UI on a whim any more than you should "deliver" a package by hucking it through an open window at the recipient's head. take the time to knock, or at least don't complain when they yell at you and throw stuff back.
Also, back in the Olden Days you'd maybe go to the book store and buy a magazine and take it home and leaf through it and see that Version 3 was just released and you'd read about it and maybe eventually go to the Computer Store and buy a box, covered in shrink wrap, for which you'd pay quite a lot of money, and bring it home and spend an hour exchanging floppy disks, and it was kinda supposed to look different, you expected that.
Now it's like you wake up on a Tuesday morning and go on the computer to do the same thing you always do and you can't fucking do it because they changed everything
YEAH. like. there's little to no preparation most of the time, and even when there is a period where the new interface in some software or on a website is optional, they'll be like "this is the new thing! what do you think? tell us!" and then simply ignore everything the users say. i'm sure just me saying that has ignited some grudge in the reader here (for me it's my eternal smoldering grudge against deviantART lol). and i get why some of this is happening but if you're going to try to please investors by wiggling things, you could at least wiggle them GENTLY.
my bet on why these things happen this way is the designers are dopamine hungry.
they spend 40 hours a week minimum looking at the same interface for years on end. they get tired. they crave novelty, this thing is boring now, so when the time rolls around to refresh the interface, they crave having all their expectations turned upside down.
by this point they want to have all their instincts be wrong so they can learn and see something new because holy fuck they have stared at this thing for 3 years looking exactly the same, and they will work backwards from “this pleases me” to every design language justification they can think of for why it’s better.
and when user feedback rolls around that is functionally “this is a tool i use daily that i don’t want to have to relearn muscle memory for,” the design language justifications are the first things to come out, we have all these articulate reasons why this new thing is better, clearly these people just need to get used to the new thing, i mean, all the designers like it, right?
