This Is Why Users Hate Redesigns
And small ways to make transitions easier for everyone involved.
If you’ve been through some sort of product redesign, you know user complaints are impossible to avoid. No matter how well thought out the changes were, it’s almost guaranteed your users will hate it.
The reason behind this is quite simple. Most redesigns focus not only on changes but especially on new users and their onboarding process.
Even if the changes were supposed to make the flow easier, the barrier for existing users will be quite high. It’s a barrier that wasn’t there before.
“People just don’t like spending their time learning, they like to spend their time doing.” — Jakob Nielsen
Nielsen, who the New York Times called “the guru of Web page usability,” puts the complaints into one of two categories:
- If the complaints focus on a lot of different aspects of the product, you’re off the hook. It’s likely your users only need time to adapt to it.
- If the complaints are about one thing only, you might want to reconsider that feature.
But why is the backlash so unavoidable? And what does reducing it actually look like?
