Empirically, as a trend across the industry, this has turned out to be false. “Design by A/B test” has dramaticallyeroded the quality of UI/UX design over the last 10-15 years.
At the first glance this seems to me like “everything was better in the past”. It seems to me like a website that’s stuck in how things were done in the past like Wikipedia which doesn’t do any A/B tests loses in usability compared to more modern websites that are highly optimized.
In the company where I work we don’t have A/B test and plenty of changes are made for reasons of internal company politics and as a result the users still suffer from bad UI changes.
At the first glance this seems to me like “everything was better in the past”.
How do you get “everything was better in the past” out of what I wrote?
I am saying that one specific category of thing was better in the past. For this to be unbelievable to you, to trigger this sort of response, you must believe that nothing was better in the past—which is surely absurd, yes?
It seems to me like a website that’s stuck in how things were done in the past like Wikipedia which doesn’t do any A/B tests loses in usability compared to more modern websites that are highly optimized.
Wikipedia has considerably superior usability to the majority of modern websites.
To write a comment on this website I can click on “reply”, then write my text and click “submit”. On Wikipedia I would have to click on “edit” then find the right section to reply to. Once I have found it I have to decide on the right combination of * and : to put in front of my reply. After I wrote my comment I have to sign it by writing ~~~~. After jumping through those hoops I can click on “publish” (a recent change because user research suggested people were confused by “save”).
Then if I’m lucky my post is published. If I’m unlucky I have to deal with a merge conflict. It’s hard for me to see Wikipedia here as user-friendly.
This creates a pressure where some discussion about Wiki editing get pushed to Facebook or Telegram groups that are more user-friendly to use because it takes a lot less effort to write a new message.
When it comes to menus you have a left side menus. You have the menus on the left and right side on the top of the article. Then you have the top menu on the right side. It’s not clear to a new user why “related changes” is somewhere completely different then “history”.
More importantly the kind of results that A/B testing reveals are often not as obvious but there effects accumulate. The fact that Wikipedia lost editors over the last decade is for me a sign that they weren’t effective at evolving software that people actually want to use to contribute.
If that’s the most severe (or one of the most severe) problems with Wikipedia’s UI that you can think of, then this only proves my point. As you say, Wikipedia is generally pretty good—which cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of modern websites, even—especially!—those that (quite correctly and reasonably) conform to the “limit text column width” typographic guideline.
I didn’t introduce Wikipedia as an example of a site with poor UI. I think it’s pretty good aside from, as I said, the line width issue. It’s also in a space that people have a lot of experience with: displaying textual information to people. Wikipedia could likely benefit from some A/B tests to optimize their page load times, but that’s all behind the scenes.
At the first glance this seems to me like “everything was better in the past”. It seems to me like a website that’s stuck in how things were done in the past like Wikipedia which doesn’t do any A/B tests loses in usability compared to more modern websites that are highly optimized.
In the company where I work we don’t have A/B test and plenty of changes are made for reasons of internal company politics and as a result the users still suffer from bad UI changes.
How do you get “everything was better in the past” out of what I wrote?
I am saying that one specific category of thing was better in the past. For this to be unbelievable to you, to trigger this sort of response, you must believe that nothing was better in the past—which is surely absurd, yes?
Wikipedia has considerably superior usability to the majority of modern websites.
To write a comment on this website I can click on “reply”, then write my text and click “submit”. On Wikipedia I would have to click on “edit” then find the right section to reply to. Once I have found it I have to decide on the right combination of * and : to put in front of my reply. After I wrote my comment I have to sign it by writing ~~~~. After jumping through those hoops I can click on “publish” (a recent change because user research suggested people were confused by “save”).
Then if I’m lucky my post is published. If I’m unlucky I have to deal with a merge conflict. It’s hard for me to see Wikipedia here as user-friendly.
This creates a pressure where some discussion about Wiki editing get pushed to Facebook or Telegram groups that are more user-friendly to use because it takes a lot less effort to write a new message.
When it comes to menus you have a left side menus. You have the menus on the left and right side on the top of the article. Then you have the top menu on the right side. It’s not clear to a new user why “related changes” is somewhere completely different then “history”.
More importantly the kind of results that A/B testing reveals are often not as obvious but there effects accumulate. The fact that Wikipedia lost editors over the last decade is for me a sign that they weren’t effective at evolving software that people actually want to use to contribute.
Wikipedia is generally pretty good, but the “lines run the full width of your monitor on desktop no matter how wide your screen” is terrible.
If that’s the most severe (or one of the most severe) problems with Wikipedia’s UI that you can think of, then this only proves my point. As you say, Wikipedia is generally pretty good—which cannot be said for the overwhelming majority of modern websites, even—especially!—those that (quite correctly and reasonably) conform to the “limit text column width” typographic guideline.
I didn’t introduce Wikipedia as an example of a site with poor UI. I think it’s pretty good aside from, as I said, the line width issue. It’s also in a space that people have a lot of experience with: displaying textual information to people. Wikipedia could likely benefit from some A/B tests to optimize their page load times, but that’s all behind the scenes.