They Changed It, Now It Sucks/Software: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

If a design of a major Web site gets changed, it can likely cause [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks|upset and confusion]]. No exceptions. This can even lead to more changes being rushed through to alleviate complaints about the original change. Most of the time the complaining dies down after a while when people get used to it, but on very rare occasions, like if a more popular competitor moves in, this reaction can be fatal for a website.

 

** Also, commenting via Twitter or Facebook.

** And now there's the new redesign of the commenting system, removing subject lines and changing the way icons work so they'll only show up if there's one keyword. The subject line thing in particular has really [[Unfortunate Implications]], as they're often used to denote triggering material in a comment.

** To be fair, the main complaint seemed to be that the "search" bar had been removed for some reason. It has been returned to us, and the complaining has, for the most part, stopped.

* Retro Junk recently had its layout changed, and some sections are gone. It doesn't even look like the site that members knew and loved.

* Often invoked by fans of evolving items on the avatar and forum site [[Gaia Online]] - despite the fact that the entire point of the EIs is that they undergo dramatic changes every few weeks.

* [http://www.flickr.com/ Flickr] recently updated its photo-viewing layout, design and controls. Again, complaints aplenty.

** Their next OS, Windows Vista, was a radical change from XP, but despite its many improvements and new features and the time since its release, allowing hardware to be able to support it comfortably and users to adjust to it, people still reject Windows Vista with very little or no reason. Hell, so many businesses still use XP that its support life is going to be ''at least'' 13 years (2001-2014).

** These same fans praise Windows 7 as "Vista done right", even though it continues using many of the features and changes Vista introduced, but doesn't change as much about the operating system than Vista did.

*** And with that said, usability ''is'' measurable, and Microsoft sure as hell measures it. They wouldn't have released Office 2007/XP/Vista/7 if its UI wasn't tested and shown to be superior. But it's possible, and even likely, for a UI to be more efficient and simultaneously more hated. Microsoft designs for efficiency over aesthetics, being the most popular OS with businesses.

** The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out. The Start menu is now gone, replaced with a Start ''screen''. Complaints that Windows is becoming too "tablet-y" in 3...2...

* Google's exploits with [[YouTube]].

** YouTube's "new [video page] design" on being "simplistic". Cue a good amount of vitriolic rage from users and viewers alike, from wanting the 5-star rating system back (now it's a thumbs up/down) to how clusterfuck the layout looks. Although it was already proven most people used 5 stars or [[GIFT|abused 1 star]]...

**** On December 1, 2011, YouTube changed their layout again. Like the previous updates, it got a lot of complaints from the users. Mostly, people missed being able to delete videos from their subscription updates on their home page that they either didn't want to watch or already watched, which is impossible now.

**** March 7, 2012 forced the "Cosmic Panda" channels on everybody. [[YouTube]] wanted to make them look similar across all the channels, which led to them basically removing all customization options besides the background, and burying the many things into tabs, whereas the previous design had everything conveniently on the same page. The channels, to put it bluntly, weren't well-received.

** Speaking of Google, a few recent changes they've done with the search engine. First is the clutter of images in the image search results. There's no display of source without hovering over the image. If you want to switch to basic version with individual pages, you have to drag down bottom while images are loading. The other is Google Instant which displays results immediately upon typing before you hit search. This can slow or freeze your browser if you type fast and don't have a very fast connection and require cookies to turn off Instant. YMMV on this.

* vBulletin 4. The changes to the style and features were not popular to say the least, going far enough to start a [[Hatedom]] for the software including multiple blogs against the company. But it was part justified, in that before the former manager left, there was a completely different set of screenshots of what the software was going to be like, which apparently many of the customers preferred to the finished product.

* The switch of many of the wikis related to [[The Other Wiki]] from the longtime Monobook skin to the current Vector by default (along with a more [[WYSIWYG]] editing interface) got a few longtime Wikipedians annoyed, but usually minute changes to the site's "puzzle piece" logo are much more noticed and have to be rolled out carefully.

* Oh, [[Neopets]], Neopets, Neopets. Every change is met by rage by the [[Unpleasable Fanbase|players]], even if it's something as a simple as taking out a feature that never got used. Most prominently, people hated the NC Mall, the customization option, the revamp of the Neopet designs, and Viacom buying Neopets.

** A [[Renamed Tropes|trope getting renamed]] can be subject to this, as can text formatting changes like the removal of strikethrough, color, and size options.

* [[Ubuntu]] was designed specifically to be a user-friendly, Windows-like Linux distribution, one that would be accessible to first-time Linux users without hindering power users. It was successful; as of this writing, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro, and the third most widely-used computer operating system in the world (behind Windows and Mac OS). However, beginning in 2010, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, began making curious, largely arbitrary interface changes to the desktop (moving window controls from the right side to the left, among other things) in the name of progressive design; the most radical of these changes was the introduction of the Unity desktop in April 2011. Unity is a mobile phone-like interface that was once used in Ubuntu's now-discontinued netbook editions; its adoption has [[Broken Base|polarized]] the user base amid complaints likening Unity to [[Obvious Beta|beta software]], calling it buggy, unpolished, clumsy, and prone to crashing. Despite these claims, Canonical has stated their intention to continue developing Unity and eliminate the "classic" Ubuntu desktop altogether. As a result, other, similar Linux distros have been seeing an influx of new, ex-Ubuntu users who want nothing to do with Unity.

* British radio station Web sites. Where do we start?

** Orion Media in the Midlands, for using WordPress rather than FirstMediaWorks -- apparently people ''liked'' the ASP.NET-based sites, even though the design can be mimicked in PHP or Ruby on Rails/Python.

** Bauer Media are a constant victim of this trope, with people saying the 2001-2005 design with the "on-air now" icons on left-hand side was the best (and this was in the days ''before'' social media arrived!)

* In human-computer interaction circles, this phenomenon is known as "[[wikipedia:Baby Duck Syndrome|Baby Duck Syndrome]]", where users "imprint" on a set of features that makes it difficult to adjust to changes in software, even if they make it more efficient than the previous version.

* As of December 2011, [[Yahoo!]]! no longer just allows users to stay logged on for two weeks, without first typing a nearly illegible CAPTCHA code. It is possible to sign in through Facebook, but that requires signing into Yahoo! on every visit.

* People started fleeing Stumbleupon to go to tumblr once Stumbleupon got rid of photoblogging.

* AOLusers fear change profoundly. When AOL 9.0 was released, the AOL Web site was changed to the new blue and curvy look of the new version. Users called the tech support line and shrieked for weeks. When it finally died down, AOL 9.0+ was released, the website was again changed... The ''only'' change was the 9.0 / 9.0+ logo, and a very slight change in the color blue of the Web site. And users called the tech support line and shrieked for weeks, claiming the changes were costing them money and making their children cry. (Really.)

** TNT Basic is now available in beta for Intel Mac users, but Hieroglyph, the companion application for actual coding, has not yet been ported.

* [[Gizmodo]]'s site overhauls in 2011 caused much outcry that really hasn't settled down yet (as of January 2012, anyway). The biggest two complaints were the new homepage (which allowed articles to be "featured" like on most regular news sites, as opposed to the blog format) and numerous bugs in the commenting system (including issues like comments not posting, replies to comments being posted as separate comments, embedded images and videos not showing up, etc.). In regards to the first, there is a "blog view" that reverts to listing stories in chronological order like it used to be; in regards to the second, several bugs were fixed and comments usually work these days, but there are still issues with videos and images not being embedded.

* When Image-Line removed pattern blocks in FL Studio 10, the user base wasn't exactly pleased.