> It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it.
One reason is that UI is a fashion-driven space so as the fashion changes there is increasing pressure to rewrite everything to look like all recent apps look, even if it breaks functionality.
Another reason is that if an application has a well-polished UI that all users love.. what's the UI team going to do? How does that newly hired UI PM get to make a big impact so they get a promotion? So there's also a lot of resume-driven UI change for the sake of change.
For the second problem, a partial solution is to have shared UI teams so they can keep busy improving the products which need the most improvement and leave alone the ones that are already good. Of course, hard to do in a smaller company that might only have one product.
For the fashion problem, no good solution. Ignoring fashion entirely works for software that targets technical people but for mass-market applications, no good solution.
One reason is that UI is a fashion-driven space so as the fashion changes there is increasing pressure to rewrite everything to look like all recent apps look, even if it breaks functionality.
Another reason is that if an application has a well-polished UI that all users love.. what's the UI team going to do? How does that newly hired UI PM get to make a big impact so they get a promotion? So there's also a lot of resume-driven UI change for the sake of change.
For the second problem, a partial solution is to have shared UI teams so they can keep busy improving the products which need the most improvement and leave alone the ones that are already good. Of course, hard to do in a smaller company that might only have one product.
For the fashion problem, no good solution. Ignoring fashion entirely works for software that targets technical people but for mass-market applications, no good solution.