Rolling out updates to the UI or UX of a website is a common situation, but it is one that can be a source of frustration to your users (and yourself) if you don’t push the release with a measured approach.

Reducing user friction can make or break an app, especially since users are programmed to hate your new design.

Why Users Hate Change

It’s not their fault! Users resist change. This is because of the design affordances we leverage all the time in our interfaces. Design affordances can exist on different levels of scale. For example: a trash can icon is known to the users as delete, an X icon is also known to users as delete, but if you suddenly change from one to the other in an update to your design system, you are breaking your own affordance that you’ve created with your user. This means the user has to re-learn what they knew, even though it’s a common global affordance. When a user gets confused it can lead to frustration and therefore a bad user experience.

Companies have been known to go to great lengths to reduce friction to change. A great example in a talk by Rohan Puri (first noted by UX guru Jared M. Spool in 2006) is how the team at eBay took their original site design and changed the background color of some areas of text from a dated looking yellow, to a more modern white layout. Users lost their minds and sent so many complaints to eBay that they changed it back to yellow. But here’s the clever part, they wrote an algorithm that changed the color from yellow to white over the course of one year. So subtle was the update that none of the users even noticed and they received no complaints.

We don’t all have a year to roll out changes, but there are a few things to do that can minimize user friction to new UX feature rollouts.

Reducing Feature Bloat

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcom (Jurassic Park)

But seriously, it’s important to remember that not every feature is something that users actually want. Jared Spool goes into this in a talk about feature bloat, but I think deciding to add a feature can really be boiled down to answering some core questions of usability defined by Jakob Nielsen:

1. Does your feature increase Learnability?

2. Does your feature increase Efficiency?

3. Does your feature increase Memorability?

4. Does your feature reduce Errors?

5. Does your feature increase Satisfaction?

Assuming this conditional is met, let’s look at some ways to smooth the transition. In an article by Melissa Smith, she lists seven tips:

1. Roll-out in Phases

2. Make it Known Ahead of Time.

3. Add In-app Tours & Walkthroughs

4. Update Your Change Notification Log

5. Add In-Screen Notification Bars

6. Let Them Revert Back

7. Welcome Feedback

The author goes into each these more deeply, so check out the article for more.

Learning From Others

One way to learn is to look at how the big boys are doing things, so below are links to several product rollouts that I found particularly interesting.

Look at Gmail:

Look at Instagram:

Look at Facebook:

Look at YouTube: