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by lowercased
1805 days ago
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> This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. > I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. I don't know. My experience is, for many smaller niche things, they're entrenched in orgs and used The One Way, and any deviation - change a button label, add a menu, etc - will result in a lot of complaints from existing users. They'll have to 'retrain', etc. No doubt some people will appreciate and welcome 'new/modern' stuff, but many won't. And figuring that out ahead of time is... time. and effort. And along with that, there's usually heaps of institutional/domain knowledge that just can't be replaced without... time in the trenches. It's not that it's not possible, it's just not typically 'worth it' for most people. ROI is too low compared to other options. |
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People hate this just as much in almost any software (or, most any UI, physical or virtual, for that matter), they just often don't have a way to push back.
You wouldn't know it based on current trends, but consistency and predictability are king in user interfaces, as far as actual usability goes. So much so that high levels of severe bugginess can be preferable than less-severe and common bugginess, if the former is consistent and predictable ("if I press this button then that one, the application will crash or glitch, every single time, no matter what state the program is in—so, I won't do that") and the latter isn't ("about once a day this button takes me to the wrong screen, and the behavior seems random"). If your users are your top priority, changes will occur gradually, and only with excellent motivation. Grand re-designs are among the most user-hostile things you can do (despite their popularity).
[EDIT] to be clear, they don't have a way to push back in the modern age of rolling updates and old versions being infeasible to obtain at all, possibly broken even if you can, and, most likely, full of known vulnerabilities that will never be patched. In the old days of desktop software that you actually purchased, and that operated just fine entirely offline, the way to push back was not to upgrade, and it was common.