The UI is designed for features A, B, and C. We design, test, revise design, test, and so on. There’s more thought and rigor that goes into than you might be thinking.

Hurray, product launches, it looks good, and most importantly it works and users are successfully completing their tasks.

Now what? Well at the company town hall meeting the CEO announces features D, E, and F. Oh, there was a team already working on these features in isolation and the workflow is set in stone because they already built the back-end services and APIs. Ok, now we need to design UI for these features and cram them alongside A, B, and C.

If we were smart we designed the UI in such a way that it can accommodate new stuff, because we always know there’s new stuff coming down the line. It fits, but now the UI is getting a bit bloated.

Now here comes new features G, H, and I. Oh, by the way feature H is similar to E, but it works totally differently. They kind of fill the same role, so we need to make sure users aren’t confused by it. No, we can’t merge them because E is owned by product but H is the CMO’s initiative.

Cram more stuff in. Now it’s starting to get confusing, and the design that made sense for A, B, C, D, E, and F doesn’t really work with I because feature I does something that current user’s don’t really need, it’s meant to grow our market share.

Rinse and repeat until the only thing left to do is nuke it all from orbit and repeat the cycle.

In my experience it’s a symptom of a dysfunctional product culture, not overzealous UX designers. We’d rather not design new UIs for the same product constantly and do “refreshes”, we’d rather be fixing all the unglamorous problems in existing UI that frustrates users or get to the backlog of WCAG violations that no one seems to care about.

For instance:

"The new UI is better." "This code is better."

However, without clarification, "better" can be subjective and may simply indicate a difference rather than an inherent improvement.

Considering the previous functionality of the UI/code, the new "better" version should demonstrate significant enhancements to be worth considering.

I absolutely hate software that doesn't change the UX. The chance that they got it right on the first try and kept it right as the capabilities grew is exactly zero.

Keeping old UX is nearly always lazy or forced. If you have or hope to have growing userbase let the stuff evolve. Let stuff move to where new users expect to find it. Let it move to places that make sense now. Sure, offer legacy UX for old users that absolutely hate change but don't stifle yourself and your new users.

This could be even not because of some flawed initial design, but due to unrelated technology advancements that are available just now.

I cannot count how many times a major versioning of a large piece of software that was tied in with a UI redesign signaled a massive overturning in positive usability and focus of the authoring company but.... it's been almost every time.

The greatest 'power user' focused engineering programs I formed my career around all had something similar in common: they had a core UI that was brilliant in the way it worked, and stable. New features got added to that base UI as incremental menus, additional icons in workbenches, and every now and then an extra menu or two.

But they didn't go wiping the slate clean and coming up with complete new workflows. They kept it familiar while improving the end-user productivity, and THAT is what kept customers re-upping their licenses year after year after year. Add things for those who already are users. Expand where needed. Don't rock the boat unless really needed... because nearly ever time I've seen that boat rocked the MBA's and 'Designers' doing the rocking are under the impression they are smarter than the people who built the boat in the first place.

Dassault Systèmes has spent a decade recovering from the absolutely asinine decision to revamp the UI of one of the greatest engineering tools of the modern era (CATIA V5), to make the icons glow all cool and be completely blue/gray duotone with one fucking hue and far less functional density, purportedly because someone in their infinite business/designer school wisdom thought it looked more 'modern' and signified 'change', resulting in the absolute backwards fucking step that was CATIA V6. They've been backpedalling ever since, IMO.

If you don't change the UI, nobody notices- and that's usually a good thing....

You're quite literally leaving zero room for things improving over time. Either whoever built the software got it exactly right on the first try, or it's an insider political move.

Never mind that products can evolve over time, or that technology can enable new features, or that users can request new things, or that we just get better at building UIs over time.

I mean, I am terribly glad we're done with Windows 95 and Android 4 style UX; aren't you?

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/new-ui.html

This breaks my historic workflow of keeping an unsaved notepad open so that if it was detected it wouldn't force close other processes with unsaved work and I could save them or rely on my PC to stay awake and running some long-running process overnight.

The first time I woke up to a restarted PC with my place lost bc of this, I realized that Windows' days were numbered on my hardware.

On the flip side, who do get to be promoted.

A 99% of folks could not care less, when they're not downright annoyed by the UI changes. There has been major reactions on UI changes (from Office, Gmail Windows, Gnome, iOS and macOS to Facebook). There have been in comparison crickets about the UI not "updating fast enough", and those are mostly from designer types (like the stupid "skeuomorphic" hoopla a decade ago).

A small minority of designers and superficial people is the one making any noise about UI needing to be updated every time.

As long as they aren’t broken or removing large amounts of useful functionality. The only redesign I’ve ever disliked is the Reddit one, and only because it still doesn’t work properly.

You’ll be happy to hear there’s an easier way of saying this! It’s “subjectively”

If you need a shorthand you could also go with “IMO”.