Again, Slack (owned by Salesforce) is changing its look and feel. But this time users aren't allowed to stick with what's familiar and works just fine.
Software companies do this routinely.
It's as if the furniture dealer had the right to come into your home and rearrange everything -- but you weren't allowed to put things back where you liked them.
It's simple corporate arrogance, and the software business is absolutely brimming with it.
@dangillmor
Been saying for a while: we need a mechanism, probably webapp based, where you can't actually force an interface change. The front back protocol brokered through a third party or something.
@dangillmor To be fair: it's rather like you regularly check into your favorite hotel, and someday you find it has been re-decorated. Would you call that arrogant? Let's not forget that it's not your software, you've just obtained a license. If the license doesn't state "we guarantee the UX to remain unchanged" - I'm afraid the complaint is a little pointless.
Speaking as someone who maintains proprietary software myself: It's a good idea to politely ask my users, for sure, but they don't get to take decisions around here.
@papageier@dangillmor
Not really. Changing the decor in a hotel doesn't change your workflow, the usability of the hotel or the functionality that it delivers. It's more like driving a hire car where the company reserves the right to reconfigure and replace the entire dashboard and switch from manual to automatic gearbox and back again ad lib.
@dangillmor It's worse than that. Some PM has a job to improve things in some ill-defined way, they change stuff, measure a bunch of uncorrelated things, report only the metric that happens to go up. Rinse & repeat until promotion.
@dangillmor Discord recently rolled out a mobile app update, but now every workflow requires at least two additional steps. It annoyed me to the point where I decided to uninstall it.
@dangillmor Yes, there is, but they use electron and all their apps are the same including desktop. It's a little more bearable on the desktop with the additional screen space but still hot garbage.
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