Maybe the average design is bad, so good designs becoming worse after redesigns is just regression to the mean. Bad design is not the exception—bad design is the norm, and good design is the exception.
I have had the chance to watch software get made up close at several jobs, and this seems to track. Even designs that seem to be good normally aren’t, and the having to add features normally makes the design worse (less usable, less clear) without a herculean effort against that tendency.
I’m about 40 pages in to Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which seems to be the seminal text on this sort of thing, and even this early in the book it’s clear that there’s far more ways that a design can go wrong than ways than it can go right. Design is hard.
Maybe the average design is bad, so good designs becoming worse after redesigns is just regression to the mean. Bad design is not the exception—bad design is the norm, and good design is the exception.
I have had the chance to watch software get made up close at several jobs, and this seems to track. Even designs that seem to be good normally aren’t, and the having to add features normally makes the design worse (less usable, less clear) without a herculean effort against that tendency.
I’m about 40 pages in to Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which seems to be the seminal text on this sort of thing, and even this early in the book it’s clear that there’s far more ways that a design can go wrong than ways than it can go right. Design is hard.