People always hate redesigns of popular services, and the truth is that it doesn't matter. A redesign has never encouraged any significant % of users to leave any service. People hated Windows 8, new Youtube looks, new Facebook timelines, Twitter changes, and nobody ever left any of these because of those changes. Another matter is that these petitions can be easily scripted and signed from thousands of IPs in a matter of minutes.
> People hated Windows 8... and nobody ever left any of these because of those changes
How would you "leave" a product that you have already paid money for? They'll just avoid buying stuff like that in the future. Leaving is for services.
Windows 8 is an utter disaster. I'm pretty sure that explosive Macbook growth at the time was fueled by this (and Vista). Today, Windows is for miserable people who can't afford anything better. This is understood by consumers. This is also understood by hardware makers. It takes two strikes to ruin product's reputation.
- 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.
That's absolutely true (it's my favorite Linux distro), but it doesn't help much if an application you require isn't available for that OS. If you are a gamer, you are probably going to run Windows. If you are an iOS developer, you will probably have a macOS machine. If a great web browser is all you need, then just about any OS is going to work well for you.
All of the big operating systems are very good these days and have been for quite a while.
> Today, Windows is for miserable people who can't afford anything better. This is understood by consumers. This is also understood by hardware makers.
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
I'm sorry for you to hear, but there's more poor and miserable people in the world than affluent ones.
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.
I use Windows, OSX, Linux and BSD. And my main OS is Windows. Sorry that you don't like the OS. Maybe you never learned the APIs or read some of the public code. The windows kernel isn't bad by any means. And its userspace utilities are pretty damn good.
You sound like an autist. Maybe you are, then who I am to judge you? Kudos for koping.
But if you aren't, you are showing a dangerous level of disregard for human wellbeing.
A dismal OS was shipped to around billion customers, which undid basic UI features that they were accustomized to.
And your defence is that this OS was made with perfectly fine parts.
Windows as a main OS is a horrible experience IMO. I want a normal start menu. I don't want anything to do with the Windows app store which is full of 99% junk. I don't want most of the preinstalled bullcrap like the XBox app, people, Cortana, etc. I don't want automatic updates forced on me (especially when I can't even set reasonable working hours). Yes, I understand most of these things can be mitigated but it takes work. Prior to Windows 8, these things just worked.
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.
Yeah, I think two very different things are mixed together:
- "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.
I can also say that I've basically stopped using Last.FM after one of their re-designs.
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.
What did you use last.fm for besides scrobbling? I still go to it once a week to see my scrobbles and popularity of certain artists or related ones. The redesign removing personalization of own profiles annoyed me. But didn’t change my habits much.
Any new artist name I have heard, I would look up in last.fm to gauge what they similar to and how big they are.
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.
I think it very much depends on whether the redesign is just a UX/UI "refresher" or if it actually completely changes the way the service works and how you use it.
I am thinking of Digg here which is a good example of a redesign that led to a significant outflow of users.
The redesign can still hurt snapchat even if no users leave. Personally, before the update, I would look at the snapchat discover stories every day. Now I find the page so appalling to scroll through I don't navigate to it anymore. I think this is a large part of their business model, otherwise other companies won't purchase slots in the discovery page. It just depends if my experience is a one-off or if it holds for a decent percentage of snapchat users.
I really like the change. More friends, fewer brands, and the ability to unsubscribe from specific users' stories. I hope people eventually acclimate to it and it sticks around.
In principle I like that I no longer have to look at all that clickbait shite when I go to look at Stories, that said the UX of the new friends screen is pretty wild. The app is also now almost unusably slow on my Nexus 5X - not THAT old a phone - which probably contributes to peoples' reactions.
I feel like this change is probably bad for Snapchat's revenue (in terms of clickthrough to sponsored articles etc) and good for the user, which is a refreshing trend, so I hope that if there is any reaction to this it is to improve UX on the friends screen and performance overall, and not to roll back.
I really appreciate that this clickbait and influencer garbage is now separated from snaps and stories of my contacts. I don't get why this would make the app less usable. Snapchat was never an app with great UX but I think the new update is a great improvement.
Yeah, and Chrissie Teigen‘s followers were never her friends, no matter what marketing BS she wishes to spin. I don’t much like snapchat (before or after), especially when people send textual messages (conversations are frustrating because I keep forgetting what’s being replied to), but have it because a few friends send me cool stuff on it and nowhere else... but this separation is a good thing. Blending commercial garbage with my friends stuff was always dumb.
My main dislike is that it now uses an algorithm to populate my "friends" section, hiding arbitrary friends from me. I have no confidence that I can see all my friends' stories because of the exceptionally poor UX.
On top of this, Snapchat has decided that people I connect with who don't connect with me are as valueless as random adverts and "influencers". I now have no way of consuming stories from people I find interesting without scrolling endlessly through ads and clickbait. Obviously this is by design but it is some of the most user-hostile UX I have encountered.
I like separating the influencer stuff from my contacts, but I dislike how they combined snaps and stories. My main issues: 1) not being able to see which friends have stories without clicking on each of them individually; I know you get notifications about new stories, but if you want to re-watch a story later it's a huge pain. 2) sorting friends "algorithmically" instead of chronologically; the sort isn't stable which makes it harder to track mentally. If they must have a fancy algorithm somewhere, I'd much prefer if they used it for the recommended "send to" list for a standalone snap (the reverse of the behavior present in the new update).
Because you're an idiot. People don't want influencer content in the first place. And people want their personal communication separated from what is posted in public. This was the whole point, it's what made it great, how it separated the private from the public so efficiently.
I downvoted you for being arbitrarily rude. From the guidelines[1]. You're new here, so I feel it's worth pointing out that sort of incivility isn't generally accepted here.
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
As someone who uses both private snaps and stories equally, I think the update is a mess. It’s like having an inbox that includes a bunch of newsfeed that should be in its own public space.
Although not ideal, the previous version does it better by putting public stories together with publishers. Now that they have a totally separate page for popular stories and publishers (also adding the fact that it’s immensely annoying to scroll down huge images and headlines to find decent content), I’m discouraged to even swipe to that screen.
This is analogous to Facebook moving from individual walls to a newsfeed. Why did they move to newsfeed? Easily consumable ad units.
People WILL get used to it, and advertisers will soon have programmatic access to ads that will show in the Discover section. Whether or not they will add value to the advertisers with this format is the real question.
This change is no surprise to me, nor will they change it. Driven by the need for ad revenue [0]
There was no real alternative for facebook. There is one for snapchat and it's called instagram stories. The way I see it, snapchat will lose even more users to instagram while at the same time increasing their per-user revenue. What's left to be seen is whether the increase in per-user revenue will make it up for the lost users.
Snap and Bitmoji are at the top of the charts in the app & play store (even above Instagram for the most part) since the update came out, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadAnd as Rushdie put it, to be born again, first you have to die.
How would you "leave" a product that you have already paid money for? They'll just avoid buying stuff like that in the future. Leaving is for services.
Windows 8 is an utter disaster. I'm pretty sure that explosive Macbook growth at the time was fueled by this (and Vista). Today, Windows is for miserable people who can't afford anything better. This is understood by consumers. This is also understood by hardware makers. It takes two strikes to ruin product's reputation.
As I sit here running Windows on a Macbook...
- 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.
All of the big operating systems are very good these days and have been for quite a while.
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
[1]https://netmarketshare.com
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.
But if you aren't, you are showing a dangerous level of disregard for human wellbeing.
A dismal OS was shipped to around billion customers, which undid basic UI features that they were accustomized to. And your defence is that this OS was made with perfectly fine parts.
No, that's not a good line here.
In this market, unfortunately, Linux is non-player. Even Google Pixel is more visible.
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.
- "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...
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.
What would you like to see in terms of significant new features and changes?
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.
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.
I feel like this change is probably bad for Snapchat's revenue (in terms of clickthrough to sponsored articles etc) and good for the user, which is a refreshing trend, so I hope that if there is any reaction to this it is to improve UX on the friends screen and performance overall, and not to roll back.
On top of this, Snapchat has decided that people I connect with who don't connect with me are as valueless as random adverts and "influencers". I now have no way of consuming stories from people I find interesting without scrolling endlessly through ads and clickbait. Obviously this is by design but it is some of the most user-hostile UX I have encountered.
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Although not ideal, the previous version does it better by putting public stories together with publishers. Now that they have a totally separate page for popular stories and publishers (also adding the fact that it’s immensely annoying to scroll down huge images and headlines to find decent content), I’m discouraged to even swipe to that screen.
People WILL get used to it, and advertisers will soon have programmatic access to ads that will show in the Discover section. Whether or not they will add value to the advertisers with this format is the real question.
This change is no surprise to me, nor will they change it. Driven by the need for ad revenue [0]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14983800#14985153
Except it’s based out of LA...