Conservatism of Software Users
Tags: programming
Published: 2023-05-02 07:30:04

Over the past few years, we’ve migrated our customers to new versions of the platform several times. At the same time, we were constantly making changes to the graphical interface. Naturally, we did everything we could to improve the usability of the program. But each time, we encountered user complaints, which demanded that everything be reverted.

At first, we took it personally, thinking that perhaps we were doing something wrong. But after a while it became clear that the problem was not about specific changes, but that many users simply never want to change anything. However, progress is not possible without change. Therefore we began to accept it as a natural process and somehow learned to live with this and put up with the dissatisfaction of users.

## Don’t change anything

The conservatism of software users is not something unique. In real life, everything happens in exactly the same way. It is believed that if any survey of people on any changes were to include an item “Leave everything as it is”, then a large enough percentage of respondents would choose this. And it is quite understandable why. People are always getting used to the current situation, they know all its problems, and any change leads to the unknown. They have to think and decide how to act in the new conditions.

Once upon a time, when DOS was still prevalent, we had a software product in a text (console) interface. Over several years, the users got so used to working with it, that their actions became fully automatic and they performed certain processes with some incredible speed, using only the keyboard. At some point, new Windows systems with a graphical interface began to appear. When these same users started to use them, I remember immediately getting a lot of complaints that it was much slower to work with a mouse than with a keyboard. Correspondingly, the speed of work, and hence the efficiency, decreased many times over. Businesses immediately began to complain that they were making losses, and let’s go back to the old software product. However, in the end, no one ever went back. To be honest, until we had our own product with a GUI, we actively used this conservatism in our sales against our competitors.

Sometimes this conservatism takes some very strange forms. I remember when we were transferring one client from an outdated program to our new system, I personally encountered a user who needed to get the movement of goods through the warehouse. We showed her how it was done in our system, to which she replied that the old system did it much better. We asked her to show us exactly how, to which she began clicking with frantic speed, navigating between different forms, and eventually came up with the right one. Unfortunately, the concept of “better” is quite subjective, so we offered to count the number of clicks. We had two, and she had about 10. But she still insisted, and claimed that our system was very inconvenient.

It is worth noting that many programmers are also very conservative. You can often hear them ask questions along the lines of “Why do we need another programming language?” Or “Why do we need this technology, I can do everything better by hand? I remember when SQL servers were just gaining popularity, and there were skeptics, who claimed that their plans are inefficient, while I’m much more efficient to write a readout of data from tables and indexes stored as files. Therefore, you cannot argue that a person’s conservatism is due to their less developed analytical thinking.

## Pros and cons

Yes, it must be acknowledged that in some cases there may be some degradation in usability in certain places. In an ideal user’s world, all changes should come in the style of “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That is, people would want everything to stay the same, only certain parameters improved. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in life. Each solution has its advantages and disadvantages. Comparing them is a subjective process, and sometimes you have to sacrifice something to improve something else. Accordingly, when the program is updated, the user is immediately confronted with what has become worse, but does not immediately see the benefits. This is due to the fact that he does not yet know the new functionality, or simply takes it for granted, not yet understanding what it will give him. It is for this reason that at the first stage, the negatives outweigh the positives, and the person immediately wants to go back to the way things were.

Since, as mentioned above, the comparison of advantages and disadvantages depends on specific users, the part that evaluates disadvantages much higher immediately begins to protest. Those who see the advantages first and foremost sit quietly and are not heard. Our clients sometimes have several thousand active users. Accordingly, when even a small percentage (and this would be dozens of people) start to actively complain, then the IT department or management, who are not themselves actively working with the program, get the impression that the update has really made things worse. Although, in fact, perhaps most are happy about the change.

Once, there was a case where after one of these updates, some users began to actively complain about the changes in the mechanism of one basic action. And they complained not directly to us but to their own IT department. Accordingly, the client’s IT department complained to us. Within a month, we made adjustments so that they could go back to the old way of doing things. They turned it on, and everything was back to the way it was. Immediately, another part of the users started to complain actively that they should go back to the new mechanism — it was much more convenient than the old one. After that they started asking us to make it so that the mechanism could be switched for each user separately, which in the end we had to do.

## It used to be better

Unfortunately, users sometimes lack rational arguments and are guided primarily by emotions. When we switched from version 4 to version 5 of the [lsFusion](https://lsfusion.org) platform, the way to select objects from the catalog changed. However, in fact, it became the same as in most other programs. In the fourth version of the platform, a modal form was always opened for selection :

![Version 4](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hkehfwe1b5ony5rfm1cw.gif)

In the fifth version of the platform, the user types text, and the system searches for matching entries by occurrence of a substring, taking into account the words. At the same time, the user has the ability to force a dialog if necessary :

![Version 5](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/p2obdirlnzm1bt8r1wjz.gif)

From our point of view, it was obvious that in the new version of the platform, the mechanism has improved, and it will become more convenient for users. However, we encountered some resistance from them. Their head of IT began to ask to return everything as it was, because users are complaining massively about the fact that they have difficulty finding some objects in the directories. And it was not for all the objects, but only for those where there were badly entered names, and it was hard to determine which object to select. And then there was the most interesting part. We enabled the option that returned the old mechanism. To this we were told that it was inconvenient this way too, and it was better before. After we said that it used to be exactly like that, and if they thought otherwise, then let them tell us what it was like before. In the end, it ended with us being told that the users don’t remember what it was like before, but it was definitely better. And it’s only been a couple of months.

In about the same way, some people say that things used to be just fine, but they can’t say what exactly. And there’s nothing surprising about that. That’s just how human memory is constructed — it forgets all the bad things, but remembers the good. Therefore, over time, it seems that before everything was much better.

## What to do

Over the years we have gone through hundreds of times to upgrade various systems to new versions. And each time we’ve encountered the problems described above. As a result, it all became routine for us. At the same time for the users of our clients such significant changes are very rare, and each of them is a big stress.

> For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.

Nevertheless, there is one trick to reduce user complaints a bit. It works in real life, by the way. To do this, after you’ve made a change, when the wave of complaints has reached its maximum, you have to put something back the way it was. To do this you have to choose something uncomplicated, and make it obligatory optional, so that new users don’t know that it was somehow different before. In the end, the degree of protest goes down, and over time users get used to working in a new way, accepting it as the new normal.