Customers/users learn a bad design and get accustomed to it. Any changes, even ones that ostensibly improve it, add cognitive effort and contribute to their aggregate cognitive overload (taking into account everything else they have to learn and remember on a daily basis). The original design achieved “don’t make me think”, and any changes, even improvements, reset that.
Have to admit, when I saw the two screenshots, I thought the OP's problem would be exactly that, not the agency process. Original design not great but has a big picture of a hardware device, an unmissable order button and some explainer videos. New design much more visually appealing, but looks like a different company, potentially even a different class of product and whilst the order button isn't exactly difficult to find, it's not shouting as loudly to act.
The bottom of the post mentioned that sales have increased by 40% with the new design. It will probably take some time to know if that sticks, but it seems like it works from that point of view, even if it was maybe overpriced.
The 40% increase is ~$18k a month based on the numbers in the article. That means that redesign pays for itself in three months. That's the type of "regret" that I want.
God, I wish this were printed on the wall of every software design office. Mediocre designs are fine if people know them, because they learn to work around the rough edges to the point where they often don't notice them. But a new design (probably also mediocre!) requires way more cognitive load. Tech as an industry is horrible on this front.
Just to pick on one example: Android. Google absolutely loves changing the settings and UX on each major version. People use these controls so much they eventually get habituated... until they change and have to go hunting around and learn the new workflows to get back to par. Each one of these redesigns probably wastes millions of cumulative user hours.
> Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.
Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this is having multiple different interface options available.
For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or wanting to do it without your browser slowing down as much, the old interface is still available:
https://www.reddit.com/
https://old.reddit.com/
Many out there will stop using the site the day when the old interface goes down and for now can just use the old one despite the new one being available - thus allowing them to stick to the user experience that they're used to.
Of course, not many out there want to deal with something like this on the development side, such as CRUD systems that would need to move fields around, add new business process steps etc. There, maintaining two separate versions would be a massive pain.
I would argue that the most important factor when considering old reddit vs new reddit UI/UX isn't a matter of preference based upon performance, certain content, or habit. Old.reddit is actually just better for the end user experience overall and new reddit UI is better for Reddit's ad revenue.
Many times a user not wanting to switch to a new UI isn't based completely in effort/adaptability but a history of experience with product life-cycles weighing more towards business objectives over time. e.g. Facebook calls users lazy for not trying out "improvements" and blame old soccer moms for being inflexible when they're just trying to extract more money. Not that businesses spending effort to get more money doesn't make sense, because it does, but businesses love to lie about this common user complaint.
The fact that new reddit defaults to showing only a few comments on the post, followed by recommending 20 other unrelated posts, just shows how badly aligned that design is with their goals.
Reddit is a glorified web forum. Period. Making comments hidden and difficult to browse basically negates 50% of it's function (the other being media + content discoverability).
I imagine it's quite well aligned with their goals of getting increased user engagement metrics from increased clicks to read stuff from casual browsers to the site, and convincing regular users they should download the app
Of course it's extremely badly aligned with their regular user's goals of reading comments, but that's solved by using the old.reddit urls if not the app, whilst the casual browser coming in from Google or a link gets the full on contempt for users' desire to actually read threads UX until they've bumped the user engagement metrics up by clicking on more stuff.
old design is easier to process. not sure if its just me but seems like the new design wants to tell me what's important and I have to fight it spending precious brain cycles
That's because more often than not you're not the target audience. Growth > retention in many cases, so it's more important to give a good first experience than a keeping a good continued experience.
