Change is Not Always a Good Thing

Not everybody has a short attention span and enjoys change every 365 days (or even every five years). Do not underestimate the value of familiarity with technology, especially for people who consider themselves “normal” (read: not geeks and nerds). Change can be expensive and/or frustrating.

Why fix what isn’t “broken?” Why not make incremental improvements to something that obviously resonates with your users? Too much change at one time is like tossing a frog into boiling water; users often need time to acclimate or you risk (as a product or service provider) alienating them. Backlash is typically not something anybody wants to deal with. More at Locker Gnome.

An interesting perspective.

Comments

[Rui Duarte]

Agree. On the Palm days, the upgrade of OS was just like iOS I guess. So, we got improved features, but ultimately, the system kept the same and that was positive to the user.
The same applies to iOS nowadays and I think that's not only positive but also explains the fact of so many people keeping on the same OS. There will be the day that, like Palm, the abuse of "keeping things the same" will eventually turn people the other way.

On the Android side, I believe the system has been through a few ups and downs since its start. It was ok at the beginning but soon it was obvious a lot had to be done (particularly when comparing to the user friendly iOS). And so Android has been growing and is becoming stable. Version 4.1 is already there. The difference to me to iOS is that iOS is on the limit of improvement and Android can reach far, very far in the future. So, I suspect in a couple of years Android will reach much more ahead the iOS and it will be the future system to be used. Smart TV boxes are coming out with Android OS turning cheap TVs into powerfull media devices - I will get one of these maybe in Xmas and I can download and use Apps on my TV for... 50EUR!

So, baseline is: iOS is rock solid for now, it will become dull in future and Android is getting more powerfull but hasn't reach the limit... far from it. And this will dictate the future to come.

My opinion, of course.

[Bob Deskin]

Radical change for an existing product effectively ends support for the old product and introduces a new product. As a minor example, look at the fuss over the new lightning connector. The last thing a company wants to do is give customers a reason to look elsewhere. So unless they provide a relatively seamless upgrade plan, radical change is a problem.

On the other hand, introducing a new product that is radically different while continuing support of the old one is perfectly viable. Even in the same market.

[Bug Blatter]

Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, some people think we should have stayed in the trees, while others think even the trees were a bad move and we should never have left the ocean.

Change or no change, the key is making things intuitive. If it's new but it's intuitive then it's fine. You have to bear in mind that what's intuitive to new users won't necessarily be what's intuitive to existing users. Not always a problem; a good way to make things intuitive is having multiple ways to do the same thing (think MS Office). That way you try the way you think it should work and it works; you never need to know the other three ways that would also have worked.