apparently the whole ui changing discourse is mainly about the new discord update. i knew discord updated but i never put two and two together, probably because, i, urm, liked the update. i find it puzzling that people are having such vitriolic hatred for the change.
actually, i probably shouldn't have said that, because i'm pretty sure 90% of people are just slightly annoyed. but it sure feels like that after seeing an entire reddit thread where everyone unanimously hated it, like it's so outrageous that the entire internet united against it. and i'm the only one who doesn't understand.
i don't know how to feel about this. i like new update and i'm perfectly happy to spend some time getting used to it. but most people are reasonably unhappy to be forced to change. should we never ever change? should we make everything customizable and let technical debt accumulate? should we disregard users' feelings and force everyone to change? what are we supposed to do?
what are we supposed to do?
This is actually an interesting question because some people have specific criticism and ideas that, if they were followed, would make the changes good in their eyes. So they're okay with change, just not this specific change.
Some folks think change itself is the issue, or at least the speed and magnitude. They perhaps want change to only happen slowly and in pieces.
Of course a lot of folks are expressing frustration with the change without offering an alternative. Maybe they don't want anything to have changed in the first place? I often wonder what these people would think if they were asked how to handle the problems a redesign was trying to solve; will they suggest different changes, or will they reject the problems as not being problems in the first place?
From a professional software dev view there is already an industry-standard answer: Listen to feedback, implement changes you agree with (if there are any), and otherwise just let people express their frustration and take any hit to usage until the heat dies down. It is generally viewed as counterproductive to respond too quickly to large spikes in negative feedback unless either the business is threatened by it or it persists well past when most people have cooled off and adjusted.
Specifically, it's not counterproductive because users are always wrong—they are often working off incomplete information, but so are you, and sometimes their instincts are spot on—but because their immediate feedback is data tainted by frustration. The adjustment period to a redesign has a time limit, and if you intend to be around for a long time, what you want to base your decisions on is how users that are used to the redesign use the app, not users who are still pissed off and fumbling for the right buttons.
You can get this data ahead of time with A/B testing, although bad testing practices can make this data as bad or worse than immediate feedback.
While it's standard in the industry, it's not without its critics. Some people believe customization is vital to usability and redesigns should preserve old options as much as is feasible. Others think that part of what makes open source ethical is that users who don't want the redesign can fork the project, and market forces will decide the rest. These are compelling from a user perspective, but less so from a for-profit (even non-VC-backed) perspective due to increased maintenance effort and risk of being replaced. It's rare for multiple forks of complex software to thrive in the long term.
Some also think designers and devs just aren't listening to users enough and the fix is to simply respond to users more. There's a spectrum of how much or how little you heed and respond to user feedback, although I do think it's rare for a company to listen to user feedback in opposition to its own designers. Feedback isn't a vote, it's a dialog. You're trying to convince the business to do something, whether you do it through reasoning or through threats.
Ultimately it's impossible to make everyone happy, so you just need to explicitly decide: What do I care the most about? Sentiment on social media in the short term? In the long term? Existing users? New users? Usage hours? Signups? Revenue per user?
When you don't frame it like that you'll end up trying to care about all of them at once, which is what leaves you thinking that there's no winning choice.
i feel like one thing that makes all of this worse is when you have apps like it, like slack, that roll things out.... how they do. it's one thing when websites do it, but now even the shit you install can't be "trusted"
great, you disabled updates? too bad! here's an updated blob of javascript we pulled down. doesn't matter what you were trying to do. suddenly everything's different
one of the reasons people get so mad at windows update is that they didn't get much say in when the update went off. what's that, you had a meeting right as you got up? too bad, maybe your meeting shouldn't have been on patch tuesday, enjoy being 30 minutes late because of a forced restart and installation
there's no indication anymore. no "hey, big update coming" inside of the application. no version numbers that are visible to anyone that mean anything. hell, the idea of an LTS channel is practically gone. you basically cannot trust that any time you go to use any application that you will be able to do the task you intended without having to relearn the entire damn thing.
case in point?
patreon suddenly had and switched to dark mode when i loaded it, with no immediately visible way to swap it off, just this evening -- personally, i think their implementation looks like shit and it's mind boggling that it's not in settings but instead in the meatball next to the account switch dropdown -- and damn, that's even more fatigue with using their damn site (please, just let me have an actually useful feed again, or just set notifications to default?? something??)