[int_19h]

In my career, I witnessed several software UX changes that elicited massively negative user feedback once released - and every single one of those was backed by a UX study. It seems that if you have really strong opinions about what you want your software to look like, engineering UX studies around that is not difficult.

[cjk2]

Most UX studies ignore that users want people to leave things the fuck alone and stop breaking their workflows.

[addicted]

Or,

UX changes always elicit negative opinions and the studies show that once the change is familiar people prefer the new UX.

I’m reminded of the MS ribbon which was so heavily derided but a few years in, OpenOffice/LibreOffice also had to implement something similar because users significantly preferred it when set side by side.

[int_19h]

I don't think that this is always, or even more often, the case. I'll grant you that Ribbon might be an exception.

But the bigger problem is that these days, even when it is the case, by the time you get used to the new UX, it's not new anymore - and now it is on the way out, because the new crop of UX designers have yet another drastically different idea in mind (and they have UX studies to prove that it's better). But change itself carries a usability cost with it, and that is usually not accounted for at all. When it comes to desktop software specifically, quite frankly, what we had 20 years ago was already "good enough".

[pests]

I loved the ribbon on first sight. I also miss new features like that coming to products - nowadays it's all AI nonsense or the padding and spacing has been changed for the 10th time.