With the disclaimer that this is fully armchair, I think making changes to UX should follow two golden rules:
- Never, ever change an action to require an extra click to perform
- Never, ever change where the click to perform an action previously occurred
Examples of these sins in action:
- Outlook used to have a single button you could click to instantly mark all the unread emails in your inbox as read, and now it doesn't. You have to select emails to mark as read or unread now. Why add the extra step? Who knows.
- The addition of the "view counter" on individual tweets on Twitter (lmao, by the way) has pushed all of the tweet buttons over to the right, and exactly in the same place as the previous button was, so a lot of people are clicking retweet when they intend to favorite a tweet just out of muscle memory.
Obvious asterisk to ward off pedants: Of course I don't literally mean "never ever" because sometimes things grow in such scale that UX overhauls are needed, but You Know What I Mean When I Say Never Ever.