In the past week 3 online services that i use frequently made pretty drastic changes to their interfaces. As someone who works for facebook and someone who is subject to multiple A/B tests as a part of his daily existence, this shouldn’t really come as shock but surprisingly did. I opened all three in a pretty short duration was shocked to get hit by wave after wave of change; May be what hardened the blow was
- I never expected any of those services to change
- None of them did a walkthrough or guide to the new UIs
And the funny part is that i love all the changes, i’m not against any of them, all the 3 services have changed for the better.
The lesson here being just let your users know what you’re subjecting them to. I’m sure engagement/usage/etc. metrics of all these services will be shifted positively by these changes but what they won’t capture is my feeling of being smacked in the face with something unfamiliar . This is sounding like a little boy weeping about being lost in the woods, so i’ll stop!