Wow this person is projecting their ignorance of the decades of academic HCI studies and industry best practices, including UX design and research methodologies for bringing the user into the design process (to understand their needs) and uncovering user insights from testing designs early on in the design process. Would love to see some concrete examples of redesigns that support the author's argument because I can provide plenty that prove the opposite which simplified user flows and introduced better conceptual models/interaction design patterns that were vetted through user testing.
Maybe they've only worked with smaller teams or visual/graphic designers. Any large organization with a competent UX team can easily dismiss a majority of their claims by exposing them to the UX design process.
"Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does X instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in your product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do something in a different product."
Product redesigns should optimize and make product features more efficient/simple to use for the core audience (user personas [1]) and support their experience in achieving their end goals (journey mapping [2]).
I imagine you’re being downvoted because your post comes across as another smug designer/product person saying “I know better than you, you uneducated philistine”, with a side of “you just haven’t seen it done right and your personal experience is wrong.”
I’m sure Reddit’s abortion of a redesign has went through hundreds of rounds of UX testing and has been signed off on by the masters of the field, but it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy. It does everything worse than the existing design, except perhaps for increasing some sort of pointless dashboard metric users don’t care about.
The author's post came off the same way you've described (to my ears), while targeting design without any concrete examples so it's all conjecture as far as I'm concerned. Designers and developers should work closely together, I depend on them for their technical feasibility/performance subject matter expertise.
"Reddit redesign [...] it’s still slow, unnecessary, and buggy."
I agree Reddit's redesign is a mess and it's largely the implementation and development by the hands of developers whose job it is to code and otherwise discuss performance tradeoffs with product team/design stakeholders for exactly all the items you describe.
How are designers to blame for how it was coded? Devs should have voiced concern if they knew the proposed designs would be a performance disaster on the publicly facing front-end.
Maybe they've only worked with smaller teams or visual/graphic designers. Any large organization with a competent UX team can easily dismiss a majority of their claims by exposing them to the UX design process.
"Every change that you make to the product after I have bought it makes it more likely that I will leave your product and find something else that does X instead, because the cost to me to learn how to something different in your product is now not much different than the cost to learn how to do something in a different product."
Product redesigns should optimize and make product features more efficient/simple to use for the core audience (user personas [1]) and support their experience in achieving their end goals (journey mapping [2]).
(Downvoters- would love to hear your perspective)
1. https://www.nngroup.com/videos/personas/
2. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/