I am thinking of Digg here which is a good example of a redesign that led to a significant outflow of users.
Digg
For a while it was looking like Voat might be the new end destination after Reddit, but that was political rather than aesthetic.
It's not that I have signed any petitions, it's that with new feature set and presentation, there wasn't any place in my life for this. I still scrobble but I'm not really visiting.
That, and failure to bring in positive change. Instead of addressing problems that I am seeing (e.g. trolls and bitter people spamming broadcasts of artists) they're tweaking colors. Ok, bye.
I used events (to show that I'm going to a live concert).
I had friends there. Another thing is people stopped using last.fm eventully.
I did artsts tagging and used shoutbox. This is where lack of community tools really kicked in. Many shoutboxes were outright dominated by undesirables.
What would you like to see in terms of significant new features and changes?
- "Different" always takes getting used to. One's central neural network literally has to rewire new connections (and/or change the impact of existing ones) - for things that one uses often enough to have a dedicated circuit (which does not mean those neurons that are involved doing _only_ one thing, those exist [0], but more often it's a network thing). Heavy daily users of a service probably do have circuitry responding to that service in particular, and it has to reorganize itself a bit after the service changes. However, "different" does not have any bias towards a direction, "better" or "worse". It is just resistance to change because change is costly.
- Whether the change actually _is_ for the worse (difficulty: define objective criteria).
The initial gut reaction alone cannot be used to differentiate between the two scenarios. The additional difference is that the first point always happens and can be traced to real effects, but the second one can be subjective, you first have to define what the overall purpose of something is in the first place, which in the case of some non-(life-)essential website is relative (to whom you ask) and also not static.
Even if a change is for the better by some objective criteria, the effect of the resistance to the change itself will always be there. So initial reactions that are non-specific and only are about "the change is bad" are not all that useful. The magnitude of the reaction also may be a symptom of either the popularity (if people spend more time with something any change will impact them harder), that something really is worse, or a mix of both, hard to tell on its own.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-face-one-neur...
Please, take a look outside of the SV/US bubble. Windows currently has a nearly 90% market share [1], is available to a very wide spectrum of devices. This is not because of "miserable people who can't afford anything better", but due to conscious efforts by Microsoft to make their product accesible. And due to marketing as well
Doesn't make anything that I have said less valid.
I just want to see Windows crowd admit that they left their audience down, and etch that on the back of their eyelids. Because right now they're in quantum entalgnement state, where they simultaneously admit it, but then again "but maybe it wasn't so bad after all, we got to keep most of market share".
You let my mom down, for god's sake.
Just stop. Admit and never forget. It was exactly as bad as you fear to remember and then some.
So do you consider "miserable people who can't afford anything better" all those gamers with Ultra PCs?
I still have Windows installed but it is entirely to boot into Steam/Orgin/BattleNet. I'd rather not mess around with Wine since I already paid for a Windows key. But the Windows user experience has drastically gone down over the years. If you aren't a gamer, you should 100% be using a Mac or a ready out of the box Linux distro like Ubuntu or Mint. I absolutely hate what Windows has become and it is a miserable experience now.
As I sit here running Windows on a Macbook...
All of the big operating systems are very good these days and have been for quite a while.
- You probably run it on Macbook because native Windows laptops are sub-par and bad value for the buck. Reinforces my point.
- You probably run it because you have to. Reinforces my point partially.
Yes, maybe Win10 is not so awful anymore. Who cares, the damage is done. The trick is not hitting the target once in a blue moon. The trick is hitting it every time, and it's obvious MS can't do that. Between Windows ME, Vista and Win8, can you remember even one comparable failure from Apple?
Win8 was so bad, it made Linux desktop look usable by comparison. Even as it was itself neglected as OSS enthusiasts moved to Mac OS en masse.
Apple's products are big ugly failures very often:
- Siri is a disappointment from usability point of view and ridiculed on the internet when compared to other digital assistants
- Apple Newton
- Apple servers, where it turned out that in the server market a shiny case doesn't matter as much as power, efficiency, and cost (bang for your buck)
- G4 Cube
- Any of their several mouses
- Any of their several keyboard
- The U2 itunes incident
- The "You're holding it wrong" fiasco
- The recent hilarious iphone X calculator bugs
- iPhone bending
No, I use Windows because I like things just working. OSX/Linux doesn't just work.
>one comparable failure from Apple
Just the whole damn OS. If I want unix based I'll use Linux.