Better UI is not universal. And the absolute, hands down unquestionably best, UI that can possibly exist for any given customer is the one they're already an expert in.

Can a different UI end up being better for them? Sure. Will it be better the day it's released? No.

The user has to pay a cost every time the UI changes, regardless of whether it's actually better for them or not (and it will never be better until much later, once they've become an expert in the new version).

Worse - I see more and more companies optimize UIs for the "initial user experience" and onboarding new users (more paying customers). The sad truth is that many times that means dumbing down a much better UI for the "already expert" customer - just like putting training wheels on the bike is great for the person that's never biked, and utterly infuriating if you already know how to ride.

This is why existing customer bases are so rarely fond of any change - regardless of whether they end up liking it in 3 months time. It has a real cost, right this second, and they're being asked to pay it.

If you already spent months training a new hire on how to get something working with all the different random tools and software they use, changing something meaningful means breaking that persons ability to do what they need to do for their job, at least for some time.

Even changing something inconsequential will confuse some users for a bit, require making/updating new training guides, etc.

If it’s a business on the edge or under during a stressful period? That can literally tip it over and make it non functional. That is especially true for small businesses.

This is one of the reasons business productivity software becomes unwieldy after a while -- it's fine to add buttons and menus, you just can't change existing ones or what they do. So then version 5 will finally introduce the massive, desperately needed UI refactor after ten years, while plenty of clients just stay on version 4. (An example of this is the Blackbird CMS -- old Blackbird vs new Blackbird.)

If your new product with ten years of improvements was so unattractive compared with the existing version your customers are currently using that they were choosing not to update, what does that say about the value to the customer of all those improvements?

In the world before SAAS we saw both extremes often. Some products had incredible dev teams and people would upgrade relatively often even when each new version cost extra money. Other products barely produced an interesting change in several new versions over several years and users mostly didn't pay for those updates.

SAAS is a convenient business model for the developers in the latter category because it locks in the ongoing revenues whether any future changes add value or not. They just need enough lock-in effects that once you've signed up you can't easily move to one of their competitors.

Then, switch to new vendor or the next major version.

Software Lifecycle for reals baby!

It's also built with table elements. The programmer in me is screaming because that's not the proper use of tables (I know that was the way to build layouts in the past, but that was then and this is now). The UXer in me is screaming because it's a nightmare for accessibility.

I want to add that I'm not coming from the "Overengineer-and-Bloat-Every-Website" UX School of Thought, so I agree with your point about Reddit. Being performant and light on resources is part of what makes a good UX, but that's the thing: there's more to UX that loading fast and running without hiccups. I think HN's experience could be greatly improved without compromising in any of those aspects.

The default font size is unreadably small, it's impossible to reliably tap on upvote without accidentally hitting downvote on mobile screens, comments with code blocks with too many characters in a line break the width of the interface, huge comment threads indented 15 times aren't collapsed by default, downvoted comments lighten to become unreadable, I could go on.

But there's no decent alternative for HN's content and community, so we put up with the terrible decade-old interface because we don't have a choice. Although people are constantly inventing their own clients for it precisely because it's so terrible.

The only of those complaints I even half recognise is the voting buttons on mobile, but I miss them rarely enough that I’d probably still rather not give up any more screen real estate (horizontally or vertically) or add an extra click.

Otherwise HN has basically the UX I wish every site had.

Frankly, neither programmers nor graphic designers are qualified to make good UI decisions. Human factors is a real field that people get PhDs in. You really can't just wing it, especially if you're a programmer whose mind has been thoroughly addled by decades of using programmer-designed UIs from the Nth circle of hell.

If HN had such great UX, there wouldn't be multiple browser extensions (and clones) that focus solely on fixing the UX. I'm not saying the UX is terrible, but I wouldn't call it great. I think the best term for it would be "consistent." It's basically Craigslist. It's fine if you've been using it for years and have adjusted your behavior to work with its quirks, but it does not provide a smooth experience that would work for a community you're starting today.

Just because there are other products with different experiences that skin it doesn’t mean the core product is bad!

It actually means the opposite - the core product has such value and there are so many users, it actually is able to support sizable enough communities of people ‘outside the core’ to justify niche repackagings for them!

Great UX should also mean fast, efficient, and dense with information. Respectful of time, attention, and intelligence. Not making an assumption of stupidity on behalf of your users.

Great UX should primarily mean those things, at least for a certain subset of software.

Making links in profiles and text posts clickable. That's like the most basic thing you can do for your users.

Adding the ability to collapse a massive comment thread without having to scroll to the top. Also, indent guides (especially needed for the massive threads around here). Shit, HN didn't even have collapsible comments for the longest time.

Being able to comment inline and not having to navigate to a separate page where you lose context of the surrounding discussion.

Highlighting new comments since you last viewed a thread.

These are all basic things that HES addresses, there are many more I can point out. I'm not trying to insult the admins, I think they do an amazing job of running the site, but let's not pretend HN is some pinnacle of UX design. We are all just very used to it.

And personally, in the years I’ve been here I’ve never noticed or cared about any of those issues. shrug

Adding a ton of features almost nobody uses and rearchitecting the site using 'modern' frameworks, only to make it 10x slower goes right againts that oath.

The funny thing is that HN doesn't even adhere to the basic UX practices that many around here constantly complain about in new design like knowing what is clickable.

Take a look at each story list item on the front page, what do you think is clickable? Everything in the subheading is formatted exactly the same, but not everything is clickable. Same goes for the headings of each comment in a thread. And I think HN's violation of this is especially egregious since the formatting of these things aren't just the same, but they are greyed out. That's a pretty universal sign that something is not clickable. This is 100% confusing to new users.

This one is a bit more difficult to implement without a lot of JS, but one thing that I have run into many times is reading through a comment thread, trying to reply, realizing I'm not logged in, logging in, losing context of where I was, scrolling through the thread trying to find where that comment was, giving up and not commenting.

In addition to that, not remembering which comment threads have been collapsed. Accidentally navigate away? Good look finding your place again, especially if there were many new comments added.

The mobile experience can be summed up as "very precise clicking"

I think the top menu items are also named in a weird manner. Why does comments take you to a list of random comments in chronological order? How is that useful? You would expect that link to take you to your profiles comments, but no, that's the "threads" link. There is a lot of that on HN where things are (imo, purposely) obscure. I get why they would do it, but let's not pretend it's a good experience.

HN caters to the most technically literate community on the internet. They will figure out how to use this site no matter if you had to navigate the site via the terminal (some would probably prefer that "NO JS!"). We've all gotten used to how the site works, we ignore all of its issues because we've adjusted our habits to work around those issues.

And I'm not saying HN has terrible UX (there are actually many things we can learn from it) but it's definitely not the site I reference when I need inspiration for a good experience.

I would disagree that UI constantly improves, though. I can think of lots of examples where the opposite is true. But that's not due to rapid release, that's due to other issues.

> If you go slow, things don't change as much but they don't get better much either.

It's hard to think of when I've seen improvements that were so good as to be worth the cost, though. Things certainly change, but change is not always better, and even when it is, it's not always worth the cost to the user.

Decades of “experimentation” have not improved the act of typing out a document in any meaningful way. Now, they have improved the experience for the corporations who can profit selling out their users data to the highest bidder and locking them out of their own devices while charging a subscription fee.

Chugchugchugchugchugchugchug

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Please Insert the disk ‘Docs 1’

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Word count: 2351

More responsive? No. No it wasn’t. Disks were slow. Memory capacity was low. You used to have to use third party RAM disk software to complete some tasks in a reasonable time. Or install a ram doubler to let you work on reasonable sized documents at the expense of slowing your machine down even more.

More intuitive? Hard disagree. The example I gave above was of getting a word count. You had to find the menu option to do that - it wasn’t just visible on screen. Same with spellcheck. Global search and replace was slow and clunky and felt risky. You only had one level of undo.

Faster to startup? Hells no. Again, slow disks.

More reliable? There was no auto save. Everyone who used a computer in the 90s has a story of losing hours, or even weeks of work to a crash. Everyone.

Easier to learn? Learn how? Word came with a few hundred pages of dead tree manual, but if you were on an institutional machine or running a ‘borrowed’ copy you didn’t have that. There was no internet to look up how to do stuff. Maybe you could pick stuff up from the tips section of a magazine? Sure. It was super easy to learn.

Compared to all of which, google docs or Word365 is just… light years ahead.

Most changes to already functional software are just changes. They aren't improvements or regressions; they're just making things different.

But yes, if you are regularly changing your UI in order to improve your system and roll out changes, you need to validate the impact. When I was last a PM, I spent a bunch of time monitoring the rollout of changes via Pendo to understand BOTH, if was getting the adoption of features I expected from certain cohorts and seeing if there where any shifts in user behavior (either organically, due to intentional or unintentional changes) And we did this for "beta" groups as well to really validate that feature were working with early adopters before broader rollout. I guess you might not consider the later "production" in sense, but these were real customers with real workloads.

You'll be able to find examples such as that, sure. But that doesn't make it generally true.

CounterCounterPoint: If the software was perfectly functional two years ago, all that can happen with a change, any change, is to make it worse :-)

In my experience it feels about 50/50 for better/worse, whether that is features taken away due to some business concern, blatant contempt for existing muscle-memory, or misguided designers reworking things that did not need a rework.