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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Explain 'Don't Improve My Software Syndrome' Or DIMSS?
dryriver writes: I am someone who likes to post improvement suggestions for different software tools I use on the internet. If I see a function in a software that doesn't work well for me or could work better for everyone else, I immediately post suggestions as to how that function could be improved and made to work better for everybody. A striking phenomenon I have come across in posting such suggestions is the sheer number of "why would you want that at all" or "nobody needs that" or "the software is fine as it is" type responses from software users. What is particularly puzzling is that its not the developers of the software rejecting the suggestions -- its users of the software that often react sourly to improvement suggestions that could, if implemented well, benefit a lot of people using the software in question. I have observed this happening online for years even for really good software feature/function improvement ideas that actually wound up being implemented. My question is -- what causes this behavior of software users on the internet? Why would a software user see a suggestion that would very likely benefit many other users of the software and object loudly to that suggestion, or even pretend that "the suggestion is a bad one?"
if you don't code yourself, then you probably don't have any idea how much time and effort is required to implement your 'improvements', and/or perhaps your suggestions really aren't very good to start with, therefore annoying the dev, who spend perhaps months or years creating his end product, only to have some random guy from the Internets post 'suggestions' that come off as criticism.
One of two very very scenarios arises in my mind:
1) The person(s) does not want the software to change at all because they are comfortable with how it works. This is seen all the time when companies are pushing upgrades to a new version of Windows or Office or *insert a different product*
2) Your suggestions are really not all that useful and are rightfully be lambasted
Sometimes what is an improvement to you is worsening for someone else. E.g. the australis redesign of firefox, was very highly disliked by many people. Some people are happy with the status quo and don't need a new "modern" re-do of their GUI or whatever.
Many people are very tired of their software constantly changing and shifting for no good reason. Oblig car analogy: suppose that every night when you get home, park your car and go inside there was a good chance some random mechanic would come along and start tinkering - moving the controls around, swapping out the seats, adding go-fast stripes (then removing them), maybe switching the engine or making it an automatic. It would get old really, really quickly.
That's what it feels like sometimes with software. See for example Firefox over the last few years: features coming and going for no apparent reasoning, random changes, just generally irritating. It's enough to give you a case of PSSWIS.
The helpdesk closes the issue as "User error".
The engineer closes the issue as "Showed documentation".
The senior engineer opens an "Usability issue".
bash$
In good faith people can ask why you would want such a change, I don't see how that is being negative.
Nullius in verba
Users like their software to work. Most software only barely does, and every upgrade risks catastrophic regressions sold as "improvement".
As a current example, any website you use regularly might see an "upgrade"* causing it to no longer work with your browser, so you get to upgrade. Then you find your browser is no longer supported on your operating system, forcing you to apply lots of patches, or outright upgrade. Or both. Perhaps you now must use a 64bit version and since your hardware wasn't 64bit yet, you need to up grade the hardware. So simply trying to use a website that used to work peachy fine can easily cause you a week's work or more, and that's when you're tech savvy enough to do it all yourself.
Yes, you and plenty readers here will likely run cutting-edge systems. Random users, a much larger pool, probably will not. We tend to blame them for running "insecure" software, but really, the blame for the insecurity of the software squarely lies with the developers. Who choose to chase new features instead.
Honestly, it's the latter group, the people that prefer all that fancy tech to "just work", that is currently sorely underserved. Even by the big software vendors, perhaps especially by the big software vendors, that have "no training needed" and "it will just work" as the core of their marketeering.
* Perhaps not even in the website itself, but one of the many javascript libraries from elsewhere it depends upon! But likewise we saw several rounds of this with the "upgrade" to "HTML5", where even sites offering content no more fancy than text and some pictures suddenly stop working in older browsers for no other reason than that they like to chase what they imagine counts for modernity.
Because every change breaks someone's workflow. https://xkcd.com/1172/
People hate useless change. People hate change that makes their lives harder. People hate "here's a new UI, take time off from the work you need to get done in order to learn it".
Yes, sucking resources away from other users is one reason.
Others:
- Your feature or changes almost certainly comes with added complexity and/or bugs. People don't like that.
- People resist change just as a matter of being human. Any change needs to overcome this "static friction".
- Admitting that you have a better way is also an admission that they've been doing it wrong (or less efficiently) the whole time. People don't like to do admit they are wrong.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But its true, so I'm going to lay it on you.
Most people do not use software for the sake of using software.
I Know. I can hear you cry and see your tears. Get over it.
Strange as it seems, they use software to get stuff done. Its a tool. They learn the tool to get stuff done. They setup up processes that incorporate the use of those tools to get even more stuff done. And then *poof*... iPhones! Woo!
If you're constantly changing the tool, you're constantly changing the way people have to get their stuff done and constantly upsetting the process and increasing the cost of getting stuff done.
Try this for a mantra:
What do we Want?
Gradual Change!
When do we want it?
IN DUE COURSE!
Change is good, I'm on board. But take care how you fuck things up in the name of progress. Understand that yes, in some peoples view your wonderful improvement is fucking things up, and they are not in error . That doesn't mean your idea isn't great, it just means you probably haven't thought it through well enough. That said...
Usually people tossing out these ideas have little idea what they're talking about, with respect to what it would take to achieve.
OK, this is turning into recreational bitching (turning into?).
I have two shorter answers to this question, one polite, one less so
Also scope creep in projects is always a risk. It isn't about not liking the idea but not adding into that particular product. Mostly because that one more feature can break a lot and cause more rework than a new product.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't know if you've been keeping an eye on things, but generally "improvements" aren't.
Examples:
There is a reason why User Experience (UX) people are so hated - because they take a nice, big, fat dump on existing users to improve things the way that THEY want, and, again, tough shit if you liked it the other way, and tough shit if it breaks the software for many users, or even if it breaks the machine. It's not unlike an interior decorator trying to make a "statement" in many cases. Not unlike one of those shows where they have someone come in and "redecorate" the house and it turns out to be a total nightmare. This is not helped by the fact that with many situations, updates are now FORCED, so you can't throw the interior decorator out. In many cases, companies and organizations act as if you don't own the computer (and in many cases, the companies want to own the computer you paid for, and they treat the software like they do in fact own the machine). And even if you do, they usually manage to cripple you in some way (usually compatibility) until you're forced to capitulate - and things are usually even worse by then.
Note, however, that this does NOT necessarily just apply to the UI, in case I've overemphasized that - it works with any and every aspect of the software that can be changed. In short, in
"People resist change just as a matter of being human. Any change needs to overcome this "static friction"."
I'll tell you why I resist change in the software I use. Software upgrades often come with changes to the UI which often require that the user relearn how to use their software. There are few things i hate more then having to relearn how to use software features I was already using.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
When you decide to express your personal brilliance to the developer, take the time to word it in such a way that it doesn't come across as condescending or undermining.
He's not expressing it to the developer, he's expressing it in a posting to the Internet. I.e., to everyone. That's how people who aren't the developer are telling him it isn't a change they want.
When I was a younger programmer, I thought, "Features are great! Always add a feature, if it could help someone!" I overestimated the value of the feature, and didn't think at all about the costs of the feature. "I mean, how long does it take to implement this? 10 minutes? A couple days? What's that matter, vs. the utility that this would provide?"
What I didn't realize at the time was that every feature basically adds an exponential cost, and has an impact on everything else going on in the codebase. Features introduce new possibilities, and new possibilities create new state combinations, and new state combinations create new bugs and new need-to-test circumstances. New features usually have a user interface impact, several new features have a dramatic user interface impact. New features need to be supported by new or future-self programmers, who have to understand and navigate around the code. If the product is ported, the feature needs to be ported as well. New features also require additional documentation, and if the product is localized the new documentation requires new localizations.
I've heard that "the skilled Go player is reluctant to make a move." I think it's similar for the application developer, and for much the same reason.
Everyone (Many people) are suffering from some kind of version fatigue. It's as simple as that. Owning any software run device these days is like having someone come and and re-arrange all the furniture in your house every week. The novelty might seem nice at first, but after a while, any change that you don't specifically want becomes irritating.
"Hey, I think it would be really cool if you embedded vi in your video player. That way I could edit the files in hex on the fly!! Just have it switch to vi when you right-click on play!"
There's about 5 people who would actually want that feature. There are an enormous number of people who will accidentally right-click on the play button and have no idea what is going on, leading to a massive decrease in usability in order to gain that feature.
Also maybe his suggestions are crap and the guy has an overinflated sense of his own opinion.
The answer why so many negative comments are posted is that MOST people want to put everyone down. It is their way of feeling important Since they don't have the intellect to understand the issue they can only attack the postings. Those who do have insight will comment either positively or with specific reasons of why the idea should or should not be done.
This is the sickness that the world faces with anonymous posting. Even this posting will have someone pooh pooh it thinking that they are so 'funny', but they are just confirming their ignorance.
It was like a collection of subject-specific message boards.
So it was like Usenet.
I can definitely understand that sort of reaction for developers, especially if you're talking about small open source projects... those are projects which usually scratch the itch of the developer, so feature requests are definitely going to be an uphill battle if they aren't interesting to the developer (for some definition of "interesting" which might mean "actually useful", "fun to code/play with", "that code is shit and needs refactoring anyways", "suggestion in the form of a patch/pull request", etc).
I think users see software development effort as zero sum; if someone is working on a feature they aren't interested in, then someone isn't working on other stuff they think is important. It's a well-known phenomenon that often comes up when someone talks about the complexity of Microsoft Excel (in the form of the 90-10 rule)... users don't see the bigger picture and only care about their own workflow and how changes impact them.
The easy solution is to simply not give a crap about the opinions of other users of whatever software you use. They don't have your best interests in mind either.
Log in or piss off.
Seriously... you might just be one of those sorts of folks that has really terrible ideas...
Am I the only one who wants to see examples of these unquestionable improvements that must be agreed to?
Now most "improvements" to software are marketing crap. Added features are useless for most people, but sound good in advertising, or may appeal to people superficially. I've noticed that in many cases real functionality is replaced with junk (Windows 10 vs Windows 7 comes to mind). So when seasoned software users don't fawn all over new software "features" it may be more about experience than stubborn resistance from uppity users.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
And the way to fight feeping creaturitis is not to rip out parts of existing functionality that people use and replace it with something completely different that you think is more modern.
Yes, Firefox and Gnome developers, I look at you.
This could easily be likened to things like Systemd and Pulseaudio. Both are really great. But not if they get in the way by aiming for only a select audience use needs. There are some that just like what they already know. Some just complain because someone else did. But some changes force a direction that can't be see, as a limitation, by those that like the change. They can't see why anyone would want to do it any different. In some cases you can change some compile flags and adjust applications to your needs. In other cases, you get unwanted bloat, or you have to work around an improvement that works against your use case. Just because it makes sense to you, and gets implemented, doesn't mean that you have made it better for everyone. Some innovations make things easier for people that are not as experienced. The end result can be narrowing the innovations of the experienced. Expression could be used as an example here as well. Not everyone can make out what is being expressed in a philosophical discourse. If you change the language to reach a larger audience, you'll possibly lose depth and potency. The "command line interface vs graphical user interface" is another good example. You can be fishing around clicking your way through someones idea of an intuitive graphical work flow; or pipe a few commands together that do exactly what you need. Both are different versions of simplicity. Users of either side may find the opposing alternative way annoying.
> maybe his suggestions are crap
Maybe his ideas are crap. There is no way to tell since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
Maybe the way he presents his ideas is a problem. A very common problem os suggesting WHAT might be done, without mentioning WHY. You always need the why, and should lead with it. Think commercials "do you have this problem ... Our product will fix that problem for you. You'll benefit in three ways, X Y and Z." Often people suggest "let's do this" without clearly stating the problem it'll solve or the benefits of their suggestion. There is no way to tell if tje submitter does this since he didn't give / link even one specfic example.
What we DO know is something about the submitter's writing style. We know he *assumes* that his ideas should be implemented, and further assumes that we'll agree - without even telling us what any of his ideas are. Likely, he does the same thing in his suggestions - assumes that they should be done, assumes that everyone will agree that they should be done, and fails to provide even one example of what he's talking about.
Clutter too. You take a simple notepad like editor that does very little but exactly what I need. Then your propose adding a bunch of crap to it. now I need to find my word wrap option buried amongst 50 3 level deep file menus. Sure it does more, some stuff I even might want to do 1% of the time. But I'd rather the simple thing.
On the dev side: sometimes things are just done. It solves the problem I intended to solve. I have more important and currently unsolved problems sorry I'm not going to design chrome wheels for last years model instead.
??? I thought a speeding train has a lot of inertia and not much static friction. I don't see how the two are conflated.
Just FYI, "Static Friction"== inertia
No, it isn't. You're almost precisely wrong.
Static friction is a threshold that has to be overcome before inertia becomes a factor, and includes Van der Waal forces, electrostatic forces and surface bonding. When you carefully walk up or drive down an icy hill, static friction is what prevents you from sliding. But once you start sliding, inertia is what prevents static friction from winning, even when you reach the bottom of the hill.
When you arrive to some forum and post a suggestion, you are in competition with other people who use the software and might not want to divert developer attention away from bugs or improvements already slated. Another probable reason is competition between suggestions by users vying for developer time. These people shooting down your ideas probably made some other suggestions and had them shot down by other users, or alternatively have some suggestions still pending, so they view your suggestion as a threat.
There could be technical reasons why your suggestion shouldn't be implemented and users may instinctively know this because they are often experts on that particular piece of software as they use it daily.
However, as a developer myself, I can assure you that I always dig deeper to determine if the users have valid feedback or if their feedback is only playing politics.
Good ideas always influence me, even if they are imperfect ideas and would need some adjusting to become viable.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If you can successfully write that prior down, you're almost certainly wrong.
If you can't write that prior down, you're still wrong (but in the opposite direction).
Every update of iTunes
Every version of iTunes ever.
iTunes is the single worst piece of shitware I've ever seen. Non-standard interface with a clunky UI, and half the shit is hidden under layers of craptastic controls. The other half is missing, like simple file transfer from A to B.
Wanna grab just one file off your iPhone or iPad? No, let's sync the whole fucking thing because you don't have anything better to do on a Saturday night.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Mod parent up. He wins the internet for today. This is exactly why I hate facebook and the entire concept of Continuous Bugs, er, Continuous Integration.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And so they have even less excuse for their mangling of the terminology, and definitely should be smiled at, nodded to, and ultimately, ignored other than when they have some kind of arbitrary coercive power over you, in which case, do it in your head anyway.
If you walk up to a nuclear engineer with your 140 IQ and ask him to "turn up the atumz", he should probably just call security and have your ass thrown out on the street.
Seriously. If you don't know even the basics of an industry's terminology -- it's time to leave off trying to involve yourself until you get that handled. If you do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It is a good saying, but could use some elaboration.
Most change is bad. Because most have not thought through all the ramifications, and/or have not implemented the change well.
Most change is bad, because most of us have major weaknesses and blindspots. Adding someone else to the design team usually doesn't help, because what you gain with a second pair of eyes and second brain is countered by a second set of major weaknesses and blindspots. Get a group involved, and your project is totally doomed.
I think "insanely great" was a good phrase. To do something great was insanely difficult, took insane amounts of thought and effort and will. And when it all came together, it was ...insanely great.
A bridge is constrained. It rarely gets changed. It just works. Software is only partially constrained and so how we choose to work around/with constraints varies by person, by company, by decade, etc. The tyranny of choice works against good design. Hence my saying "An engineer is an artist with constraints."
The software industry has a conflict of interest. If they helped us all implement great stuff everywhere, we wouldn't come around every year with a fresh stack of money. So they implement code monstrosities, standards clusterfzcks, organizing bodies designed to bury bodies, and all while aspiring to Comcastic levels of monopoly, rather than succeeding on their merits. Embrace, extend, extinguish doesn't go down well with end users. Embrace, extend, improve forever (i.e. kaizen) would...but is rarely done. And when it is done, it becomes invisible.
Invisible software gets so good, that there are few if any bugs. It automates everything involved, so no one curses it. It saves time and manpower so management is happy. But the overall effect of all three of these effects is for people to stop thinking about it. It dies, as a "project", from working too well.
Change, i.e. churn, or turns, or flips, is necessary to people who want to get paid steadily. Solving problems is thankless work. End users are usually not sophisticated enough to appreciate it, and managers hate it because it makes them look bad (or not needed).
Life sucks, because we are all, for the most part, unenlightened. Selfish. Out for ourselves. Dog eat dog.
Yet find a place where you can do great things...and then do them...and you will be back on the unemployment line.
So ignorance is bliss. Ignorance of our own weaknesses will increase ourhappiness.
So, do you want happiness, or better stuff?
I come here for the love
Unless it is Blender since I have to relearn the interface anyway every time I use it
a lot of time its like recreating the wheel but just with new rims.
the spork is better in every way. it's a spoon. it's a fork. it takes up less space. it's not like you ever use a spoon and a fork at the same time.
still, no one wants a spork.
a screwdriver could have a hammer on the other end. it doesn't. you don't want it to.
it's not about better. sometimes, it's just about the abstract concept of knowing what your tool is, and what it does. I can have two different tools for different things.
the all-too-common swiss army knife is completely useless. Have you ever actually seen any human being even try to use a swiss army knife? It's hillarious.
software features are the same way. it's 2017. do you think anyone uses office suite programs for anything more than they did thirty years ago? maybe 0.1% do. Maybe a whole 1% use pivot tables. Everyone else can write business reports and book reports and essays in wordperfect with plastic keyboard overlays. But now we have drop down menus, excuse me, ribbon bars, excuse me, drop down menus inside of ribbon bars! Even clippy couldn't have predicted that one.
Better, is often much more useless. It's like more storage-space in your car or in your house. There's a point at which you need an index to find your stuff. And that point is way sooner than people think. So your SUV, and your storage locker, and your attic, and your space bedroom, become piles of junk. That's not better.
software functions are the same way. I need to convert video basically between four different formats in 2017. And almost always between only two, now that flash is dead. But it's been ten years, and I still can't figure out how to get VLC to convert a video into anything usable. So I'm using a shitty shareware program that's far less capable, but doesn't give me the option of producing a 10x10 pixel, 6GB video, from a simple cell phone video. Asking me to select the bitrate in an age where internet speeds vary as much as they do is the all-time dumbest option. Nobody cares about the bitrate. Ask me to choose the filesize, which means way more. Or the general quality. Do you think I care about the pixel dimensions when the compression is horrible? High-res compression artifacts, yummy.
More software features is like a new employee. If you can't work with what you have, a new employee ain't gonna make the old ones any better.
> Software upgrades often come with changes to the UI which often require that the user relearn how to use their software
And the old software and interfaces will go on needing to be supported. There's an amusing old XKCD cartoon about this.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
I wish it were just that. I've been writing and deploying enterprise systems for years and it is still basically people just don't like change even if the change is vastly superior to what they had before. I've literally had people for the first month tell me how much this new system is terrible and was a waste of money and then I talk to them 3 months later after they actually have USED it and complete reversal with nothing but praise for the new system... Most people don't like learning is the bottom line. They want to show up, do the same thing they have for years, clock out and collect a pay check. Same thing for most users outside enterprise stuff too, they don't want the application to change because they hate to learn new stuff.
Ha! If adding a few features makes the software that much worse that just means you can figure out that developer sucks a lot faster (and the code you were already using probably sucks too and is full of holes you just don't know about yet). I'll admit, I am not the biggest fan of rapid release models because of stability issues and it puts more value on unit testing over system testing which can be dangerous, but adding small feature sets should not make the software that much buggier if someone actually does it well.
...and they usually add up to a giant, steaming pile of crap.
I worked on a project once that did its best to implement all user requests in its product. By the time I started working on it, there were at least seven different ways to do any basic function, because different users thought it would be great if they each had their own way of doing the same damn thing.
The result? The software was bloated, and damned near impossible to adequately test. The permutations possible to do the exact same task were staggering. This resulted in a lot of weird bugs that weren't found during testing. It made the software brittle, and in the end the same users that wanted all these different ways of doing the same task (multiplied by a few dozen different tasks I might add) weren't happy with the resulting complexity. All that stuff that users thought would be simple and a good idea, in combination, sucked.
Sometimes it's a developers job to say no. It can be very difficult to decide when that time is, but projects that never say no are doomed to failure. Sometimes an over-arching vision as to how the product should work needs to win out over every single good idea some random user has.
I sometimes work with physical tools. And there are times when I'm using a wrench, but need to put it down and start using a hammer. I don't think it's unreasonable of the tool manufacturer to reject it when I suggest to them it would be great if they welded a hammer to all of their wrenches so I didn't have to put one tool down to use the other.
Yaz
I feel like you don't understand what CI is, or are taking potshots at a particularly extreme view of it (e.g. everyone checks in every day).
Having a degree of automated build and lightweight test on every check-in can save you from getting stuck when there's breakage-on-breakage-on-breakage from putting multiple developers work together. In turn, by not getting stuck in integration hell at the end of the cycle, you can have more time for actually-robust-test and cleanup.
Why did you post this? Do you think it matters? It doesn't matter. Why are you wasting our time? /. is fine without your post.
They invest the time and the learning to master a workflow. They expect a payoff from this investment in their ability to use these workflows to achieve other ends. When you mess with a workflow, you negate that investment. They have to spend time learning and mastering a workflow all over again before they can apply it toward their actual goals.
Nobody uses software "to be using software" or "for a good experience." They use it to get things done. If they have to spend two weeks mastering a new workflow then your improvements had better deliver a multiple of that value in return, or they're going to come back with "that's cool, but it would trip me up for all of my muscle and click memory to be invalidated."
People aren't averse to improvements. They're averse to evolutionary improvements that cost more to the user in practice (time invested and mistakes avoided) than they deliver on the other end. "Small tweaks" often fall into this category. Some dev moves a button to a more "logical" placement and for the next two weeks, the users lose five or ten seconds every single time they need to use it because their absent minded clicking—absent-minded because they're focusing on what they're really trying to accomplish, not on 'using the software'—keeps ending up in the wrong place vs. what they're accustomed to.
Dev says "BUT IT'S BETTER." User experience is actually that of being irritated and not getting things done as efficiently as usual, so their response is "IN PRACTICE, IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT OF MY LIFE, NO IT'S NOT."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I see this behavior surprisingly often as well. Any explanation I offered would just be conjecture, I'm afraid. I have some guesses about why people do this, but they're just guesses. I think it would make for an interesting psychology study.
Anyway, I'm mainly posting here to offset the toxic comments I see in response to your question. I, too, have been there. I've been attacked by onlookers for making suggestions, with the naysayers backing off only when the project leads decided that my suggestions were good ones. I've watched other people get attacked similarly, sometimes when I was a newcomer, and sometimes when I was the developer. It doesn't seem to matter if you're making suggestions for someone else to implement or offering to do the work yourself; some people seem just as likely to sling mud at you either way.
The internet has no shortage of obstructionist personalities, and the communities that gather around software projects are no exception. It makes me sad every time I see it, because to me, it is the antithesis of open software development. When it happens, everybody loses.
The only advice I can think of right now is to accept constructive criticism of your ideas, but also don't assume that your ideas suck just because some internet troll says so. A lot of them are wrong.
Imagine Usenet, only full of semiliterate Brazilians and Indians. What a glorious clusterfuck that was.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That's unfair. Blender did undergo some big changes, but they were more than justified. It's not like they're just continuously changing it, or that the changes weren't warranted. I think Blender is a better tool today because of their changes.
I have much more of an issue with GIMP. Pushing forth changes that the vast majority of the userbase hated (and railed against on the forum), and got a big "FU, if you don't like it, use another tool" response from the developers. Comments on the "can only save XCF through the save menu, changes to other formats pester you about "unsaved changes" even if you do export" design change were over 10:1 against. The brush size slider is a mess. Text editing is broken in about ten different ways, from it forgetting what font size you're typing in to not rendering full text deletion in some cases. The general quality has gone way downhill. Meanwhile, things that have supposedly been "in the works" for years, like higher bit-depth colour, seem further away than ever. Even if I didn't want to export to a higher bit depth, if I want to do a gaussian blur on a high-res image I need to do a combination of dithers and blurs because of the loss of precision at 8 bits per channel.
Facebook is the classic example of terrible product evolution (particularly Messenger... have these people never heard of the concept of screen real estate?). I'd also like to zing Google for Google Maps. Today it's way slower, they took the very convenient full-length zoom bar out (and only put the tiny one in after user complaints), buttons with similar functionality are scattered out (e.g. satellite is on the bottom left, but landscape hidden in the menu top left), photo integration is terrible (no longer shows photos where they actually are, but in a giant "bar" on the bottom of the screen, opened by an ambiguous icon that looks like three different buttons, with lines that point to the map seemingly at random), make you zoom in twice as far to see the same amount of map information (ex. road labels), added icons to the upper right that have no connection to Maps at all just for "product consistency", and so on. And it's 2017, why is their landscape option still so terrible? Even little local companies' map services have vastly superior landscapes.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
This right here.
There have been tons of applications that I have loved that had reached a perfect balance of usability and performance. Then the dev takes the development beyond useful with shit like skins or Adding this or that and it begins a downward spiral. Instead of calling the work 'good' and doing something new they latched onto their one app as cash cow to start milking their existing customers for upgrades.
Winamp was a prime example of this. When it came out it worked, it had a minimal footprint and was lightweight. Same for the image utility Acdsee, and believe it or not photoshop.
Winamp and acdsee are apps I kept in a personal library to re-install after building a new machine because I detested the complexity and garbage the newer versions became. Photoshop used to come on 7 floppy disks and did everything I use Krita for today. Although Krita is far more capable today than Photoshop of the late 90's, it's still lightweight and doesn't insist on hooking into every bloody thing on your computer and calling home to authenticate.
Add to this model the fact that now acdsee and photoshop requires a 'subscription' to operate is why I am wary of new versions.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Hamburger, kebab (or kabob if your prefer), and above all the ribbon are the worst UI changes ever. Less wasted space? Can't spare the 20 px for a menu bar? These changes caused users to do more clicks to accomplish the same task as before. With the ribbon it even shape shifts on users and removes any optical reference. Ever tried to change the font properties while editing text inside a table in MSO with ribbon? Worst UX ever...and yet everyone apes this horrible design. A well crafted and properly structured menu system with keyboard shortcuts is the fastest means to operate a UI.
you're just not deep enough in the guts of the app to know what they are. UI re-writes are seldom if ever for the hell of it. There's a few good ones:
Yes, there are, and there are also a lot of bad ones:
1. I think a new interface will give my program a fresh look even though the one I have works great and users like it.
2. I think a feature is better implemented in a different way so I'll change how it works.
3. I don't know how to implement this in our current UI so I will redo it to allow me to add this feature.
4. I think this is cool and current so let's get rid of the old UI without thinking about how users actually use the UI.
UI changes need to be carefully thought out. People don't like change and if the rewrite requires learning a new way of doing things or removes features / ways of doing things users will have problems. The developer of one program I use regularly decided to completely redo the interface which resulted in many complaints and the rating to drop from 5 stars to 1 star. He completely broke the old way of doing things and changed features so the program became essentially useless for many users. Fortunately, he quickly returned to the 'classic' interface and all is good again. If it ain't broke don't fix it is a good rule for UI design.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You're going to change how the software interacts with the user because you got a nifty tool kit upgrade? Because you went from Programing Language Not Currently in Vogue to Programing Language De Jour? You think the software should work on a desktop bolted to a desk at a shipping department just like it works on your child's IPAD? The latest iteration of homo-sapiens isn't fawning over the fully functioning design? You should get out of programming and move into a more useful career: Ocean water garbage removal. Sure, it might seem like a good idea for the UI to be changed so that some feature can better fit in to the latest UI concept, or even be cool to the latest crop of budding consumers just entering college, but changing how something works is a huge deal - not for you programmers, but for the millions of people that actually use the software to get things done.
Software is a tool, not an art project to stick in your effing portfolio. First off, UI design must be functional and then elegant. It matters not one wit if the UI is pretty or even if it wins awards for its looks if the thing doesn't effectively and efficiently do the damn job its supposed to do. Changing the UI design, especially deleting functions or moving them around is equivalent to breaking the software. It doesn't work like it did yesterday and NOW it is neither effective nor efficient. Now it requires learning, and then re-learning, and if used often will require UNLEARNING the old way -- something humans don't really do well at all. If you can't make the changes you need to the code to both improve the underlying performance, add a feature, appeal to the "youts of 'murica", and still keep the old stuff where it was and working as it was, then get out of programming. Just quit. Save me the time and aggravation of figuring out what is going through that two cell based life form you call a brain while I have a multi-million dollar project idling because the people working on it can't figure out where those vital features are now located or worse deprecated, a fancy word for too fucking lazy to keep a feature working.
And don't get me started on the "what we changed in the latest upgrade" document. I get better change logs in World of Warcraft patches than any other piece of recently "upgraded" software. Hiring some stoner you met at the Weed Works to write "We changed stuff" and hide it in a PDF buried more effectively than landslide victims in Washington State, isn't sufficient so mitigate the change chaos. SO stop lying to yourself about how it's really okay and people will get over it. No THEY WON'T. We don't get over being blamed for the consequences of some anonymous jackass programmer's design changes. We get to SUFFER because of it. And that is NEVER going away. We remember it because you're the reason the budget was blown, the system failed, we missed a deadline because the software got upgraded. We didn't get new training because we had to spend the training budget on teaching folks how to use the upgrade instead of something that might actually get our productivity up. Yeah, change that UI, will ya? We need more stress and aggravation.
Remember when Microsoft moved the print function in office? That little bitty change was a juggernaut of wasted time and effort trying to first, figure out where this common function had be re-located, and then passing that knowledge on to people who really only want to print documents as a part of their job. That's right, printing documents was the core piece of their job and one night it got upgraded into some other part of the software. Brilliant. Now we have employees approaching retirement age who already hate computers and software trying to figure out how to print documents so that they can ship product to customers while the trucks are idling outside the office at $200/hour demurage causing the shipping department to watch their quarterly bonus vanish as they struggled to figure out how to PRINT. Yeah that was a great move. I'm sure those guys w
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Try arguing someone in the checkout line about your improvement on his grocery list, what do you expect?
If you want people to do things *you* want, you either:
Really, kindergarten stuff.
I often see people asking why so many users are willing to keep shelling out all the money it costs for products like Adobe Acrobat Pro, when free or inexpensive commercial or shareware alternatives are all over the place that would allow you to edit a PDF document and save a modified copy. Same goes for Adobe Photoshop, or even Microsoft Office.
The answer is most cases is that the familiarity makes it worthwhile. I mean, yes, in a minority of cases, you actually have users who need advanced features or functionality that's not provided by any of the alternatives. But I'd say the vast majority of the time, it's simply that someone spent years using those "name brand" products for the work they do, and switching to something else that has menu options in totally different places, and toolbars with different icons for the functions they're after doesn't seem like a good value to them.