Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.

In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It's a law of nature that users hate change, and they'll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they've always done.

(Having users complain about a redesign doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it. Customer complaints are thus not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they're simply a reason to avoid changing the design purely to "stay fresh.")


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