Tweaking User Experience – What more in the name of Novelty?

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is one of those timeless pieces of advice that gets overlooked far too often, particularly in the world of product and service design.

Over months and years, you start to notice the little experiments and not-so-little changes that user experience teams at companies roll out. The first question they should be asking: is there actually a problem with the current setup?

If the answer is no, but the urge to tinker for novelty’s sake is too strong, it’s crucial to consider the type of service in question. Are users craving something simpler and faster, or is there value in a slightly more intricate or drawn-out process? Think about ride apps like Uber for instance. They don’t necessarily cut down wait times. But by reducing uncertainty, they make the wait feel shorter, more predictable, and less stressful. Or the way the multiple courses in fine dining amplify the sense of luxury. Even scenic train routes makes the journey’s beauty trump speed and efficiency.

Yet, ever so often, someone at a company decides to “refresh” something that was working perfectly, just to offer a new experience. The result? Anything from a subtle sense that something’s off, to outright frustration, to even making the whole thing insufferable.

Here are three recent examples I’ve noticed that stand out.

First up, the biggest train wreck: Netflix’s new TV layout. The previous design was straightforward— the menu on the left for profile switching, then tabs for movies, series, and your ‘My List’, each below the other. And ‘My List’ was a tidy vertical scrolling grid with 6-7 thumbnails per row. Clean. Easy to scan through and pick something to watch (even if you’d inevitably pick something outside your Watchlist, as most people do). A post and poll of mine from a few months ago explored that.

Now? In a move that seems to mimic Prime Video, the menu’s at the top center, and the selected thumbnail balloons to about 3 times the width of the others in that row. Scrolling across a row in any category is now an assault on your eyes. Anyone with visual sensitivities, or even mild motion sickness would surely feel it.

And it gets worse: your Watchlist, the classic grid, is now a single endless row with the same expanded view of the thumbnail currently selected.

And previously, if you removed an entry from the Watchlist, the focus indicator would automatically position itself at the rightmost thumbnail of the row. Now, in this endless scroll, it actually jumps a few items ahead. No clue why. Here’s wishing they undo this mess soon.

Next, the Kindle app. The update isn’t catastrophic, but it’s definitely a step backward in convenience. The old layout let you long-press a word or phrase to get a neat small pop-up: highlight options (with four colours), copy, share, plus a scrollable dictionary box and, if available, a Wikipedia entry in a box to the right of the dictionary box. Now, the pop-up is a screen-wide overlay with dictionary and Wikipedia boxes stacked one above the other. No more scrolling in the pop-up. Instead, you get expand/collapse buttons, which ruin the experience of the scroll. Highlighting is even fussier. Before, you needed to select 5+ words for it to automatically highlight in your last-used colour. Now, even two words get highlighted automatically, and undoing the highlight is an extra step. Earlier, you’d select the highlight, and click on the colour again, and it was not highlighted anymore. Now, you tap on the highlighted text, it opens the pop-up, you tap ‘Highlight’ and then select another colour to change the highlight, or the same one to deselect it. And for some reason, the colours names now appear below each one. It is a good addition if it improves inclusivity, though blue seems to be the only one that is on the colour-blindness spectrum, so I’m not sure there is a relevant reason for the names of colours being there, as they normally aren’t on most apps of any kind that have colour options for themes, etc.

6 Jul. 25 edit: Previously, clicking on a word would display a clean definition pop-up above or below the selected word, making it easy to view meanings without obstruction. Now, however, the dictionary pop-up often blocks the word itself, especially if it’s in the middle of the screen. This makes it harder to look up phrases or compare definitions, since you have to close the pop-up each time you want to adjust your selection.

And finally, LinkedIn’s messaging feature (on the browser, at least, I haven’t used the app in ages). Previously, you could reply to any open chat in the lower section. Now, that reply area sits below your screen. Meaning if your cursor is within the central messaging region and you scroll, the reply section will not appear! And you wonder if, apart from promoting templated and formula-driven posts, they’ve also reduced messaging to templated replies only (which unfortunately is the case for birthdays btw). Then you move the cursor outside the central section and realize that now it engages the page scroll, and finally, the reply section appears! ffs! Why?