Why Users Want Familiar Web Design and User Interfaces

Jakob Nielsen warns us that users hate change. He recommends that “it’s best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture. ”

You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.

Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.

Let’s consider Microsoft Office. The suite was introduced in 1989 as an incremental packaging of older stand-alone apps like Word (from 1983) and Excel (from 1984). By 2000, the underlying UI architecture was 17 years old, and MS Office was creaking at the edges. I frequently complained that the old approach was a muddled set of thrown-together features — and that the ever-more complex set of menus and dialog boxes made it hard for users to find most of them.

Read Jakob Nielsen‘s Alertbox, September 21, 2009