Re:Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation
by Wowfunhappy on Wednesday July 21, 2021 @08:27PM
(#27913909)
Those are actually great points! I certainly don't want to hand waive away any and all UI discussions (particularly as I personally enjoy discussing UI design).
But I believe that UI updates, when they happen, should be infrequent, well-considered, and purposeful, with a bias towards leaving things as is. What really bothers me is when feedback is considered invalid because it's assumed to reflect some natural adversity to change. Maybe it does—but that pain your users are feeling is real!
I almost wish software updates still had to be distributed on discs, so that vendors would be required to think and plan instead of essentially performing perpetual experiments on their customers.
The trouble with that epistemology is that it makes it impossible to discern (or at least pointless to discuss) any qualities of a user interface except how popular the interface is or how much humans enjoy using the interface.
> When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not just whether the change is better, but also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change.
This sounds dangerously close to the awful epistemology that is the precautionary principle. Both are saying that if there is some proposal for which we don't have any good knowledge about its potential downsides, we ought to reject the proposal. Your variation seems to be that we should assign the proposal some baseline cost (and thus reject the proposal unless we have knowledge that the benefit exceeds the cost). I simply don't think there is any way of establishing that baseline cost.