Resistance to Change: We Are Creatures of Habit

Leer “La resistencia al cambio: somos animales de costumbres” en Español.

Humans don’t like to change. It’s hard for us to step out of our comfort zone, especially when it comes to our habits or the tools we use. From adopting new technologies (lightbulbs, refrigerators, tractors…) to the processes that guide our work in every company.

Arthur Schopenhauer warned us that “Change is the only immutable thing,” and the best scenario to see this is the transformation that companies undergo to stay relevant. From Netflix’s shift to streaming to McDonald’s change in image and language, companies change to maintain or improve their position in the market. Yet, only about a third of these initiatives succeed. Mainly, as revealed by McKinsey&Company, because employees don’t want to change.

Users are no exception. High competition in digital ecosystems forces companies to continuously review their strategy, which is often reflected in the functionalities and design of their products and applications. Let’s take the example of Facebook’s early years, during which, while expanding geographically, it dedicated itself to changing its design and functionalities every few months, sometimes quite radically.

This situation revealed two very important points:

• The resistance to change was clear and explicit, with very negative comments focused on the disorientation caused by moving elements around or even changing how tools worked.
• User complaints are not always significant. These criticisms didn’t hinder the social network’s expansion, nor did they persist for more than a few weeks.

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” Woodrow Wilson

At least it seems the lesson was learned, and the current philosophy is to make incremental improvements, less disruptive but more frequent. These changes almost always retain familiar patterns or a visual language already known to the user. There’s genuine concern about avoiding user discomfort, and while it might seem like a good idea, sometimes this can hinder innovation.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

This mantra has been around for decades, especially in development teams. In an effort to optimize resources and time, the philosophy of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” has prioritized the development of new features and fixing reported bugs above what we now call ‘continuous improvement.’

The problem is being able to determine when something is broken or not. Just to give a couple of examples: Firefox and Blackberry were perfect in their domain until Chrome and the iPhone arrived, highlighting features that exposed their shortcomings.

In both cases, the research carried out by these companies led to reactive product improvements based on user demand, without being able to detect latent frictions — those that users have internalized so deeply that they no longer recognize them as barriers, but once resolved, they become true paradigm shifts.

Steve Jobs liked to quote Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

UX to the rescue: Improving change acceptance

It seems like a perfect scenario for user experience research and design to add value. Nielsen defines UX as the term that “encompasses all aspects of the end-user interaction with a company, its services, and its products.” The set of techniques and knowledge that allow us to understand our users’ needs and motivations will also help pave the way for improving change acceptance. Some key points are:

• Research with the right focus: Start by clearly understanding the questions you need to answer. Combine quantitative and qualitative methods, being careful not to interfere or bias the results. As always, remember that users’ statements and opinions don’t always align with facts and should always be taken as a means to reach underlying reality.
• Be selective: Most of the time, you won’t find a perfect answer, and you’ll have to make concessions. Analyze possibilities and choose what to do and what not to do based on your research data to be as objective as possible.
• Care about implementation: We’ve all experienced reading an interesting synopsis of a book, series, or movie that turns out to be disappointing. No matter how good the idea is, if the execution is poor, the result will be underwhelming.
• Be prepared for all kinds of feedback: Reactions will be diverse. The most important thing is to prepare to analyze the response and evaluate the real impact of complaints, so plan time and resources for this.
• Communicate the change and manage expectations: Generally, surprises are hard to digest, and the uncertainty that an unexpected change can bring will likely lead to resistance. To avoid this, try to communicate upcoming changes to the user community, explaining why they’re being made and detailing the advantages they can expect. By the way, if you find it difficult to list the user benefits of the change you’re preparing, it’s best to go back to the drawing board.
• Plan resources for training and support requests: Depending on the situation, consider including tutorials, FAQs, help videos, or assistants to guide users and prevent confusion.

To learn more about change management, I recommend reading Sofia Quintero’s article “The Product Manager’s Guide to Change Management.”