Users hate change
&gt; &quot;This argument is both incredibly entitled and terribly egocentric, as well as being wrong-headed on several counts.&quot;<p>From a user&#x27;s perspective, perhaps. That doesn&#x27;t make it incorrect, however.<p>&gt; &quot;Firstly: humans don&#x27;t resist change when it&#x27;s something that they asked for, they resist things being imposed upon them against their will.&quot;<p>“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”<p>~ not actually Henry Ford<p>&gt; &quot;There is an incredibly persistent cultural movement in product design that &quot;we know best&quot;, this is a very parent-child style relationship: &quot;Mother knows best&quot;, that both disempowers and disengages customers.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not that we know best, it&#x27;s that we know <i>better</i> than to just listen to users. We have all the data and research. You have an opinion because you&#x27;re upset.<p>&gt; &quot;Let me be clear: when I buy a product I am paying for what the product can do for me now. It fulfils a need that I currently have. I am not paying money out of my own pocket for a faint hope that the product may do something in the vague and nebulous future.&quot;<p>We are generally aware of this. However, when we develop a product, we have a process that, for various reasons, goes beyond your particular narrow view of our product.<p>&gt; &quot;When you as a product manager or designer or PO or whatever decide that your product should do A, B and C too, I don&#x27;t care. I don&#x27;t want those features, I didn&#x27;t pay for them.&quot;<p>Indeed, not all user share the same requirements and therefore we don&#x27;t develop the product for any one user in particular.<p>&gt; &quot;When you as a product person change the way that I have to use the product in order to do X, you are asking me to spend time, effort and attention to change my habits around X in order to do something differently, which may (or may not) benefit me in the future.&quot;<p>We apologize for the inconvenience.<p>&gt; &quot;In all likelyhood you made it easier for new users to learn X. I don&#x27;t care about new users.&quot;<p>This is where your and our interests clearly diverge.<p>&gt; &quot;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.&quot;<p>In all likelyhood, you won&#x27;t. The cost of learning an entirely different product will likely still be greater than learning the changes we made. Furthermore, there is the cost of another purchase, as well as the sunk cost on your previous purchase.<p>&gt; &quot;The more times you force me to change my behaviour, the more badwill (being the opposite of goodwill) builds up. Eventually I&#x27;ll become so pissed off that I&#x27;ll move, no matter what the cost.&quot;<p>Really, <i>no matter the cost</i>? Who are you going to move to? The hypothetical competitor that <i>never</i> changes their product?<p>&gt; &quot;The vast majority of the effort that designers spend on look and feel, typeography, colour palettes, image choice and placement, tone of voice, button placement, size and style and a host of other things are of marginal value at best.&quot;<p>Design tends to either go over people&#x27;s heads entirely, or it&#x27;s highly important. I suppose you&#x27;re in group A. Still, a product that hasn&#x27;t had a facelift in a decade will have an appearance of being outdated, even if the underlying technology is modern.<p>&gt; &quot;Thirdly: the idea that you can just tell your customers to suck it up is a relic of last-century marketing that relied on captive customer bases and lack of customer knowledge, awareness and community. Modern customers are, in the majority, well informed and highly vocal with other customers in their community.&quot;<p>Vocal they are, indeed. A select few of them at least. Despite this, we will not have <i>our</i> product be held captive by these users.<p>&gt; &quot;The idea of EPP is thus: when you have a product that works, and an existing customer base - freeze it. Instead of a major redisgn because &#x27;Material Design is so 2014&#x27; simply leave the product the way it is, bar minor BAU and bug-fix work. Instead devote effort into building a new, next-generation product that addresses (hopefully) a new customer segment, and allow existing customers to add this new product to their portfolio for a incremental fee. This allows existing customers to self-select into a new product, protects revenue and reduces the risk of existing product customers leaving due to badwill.&quot;<p>Unfortunately, there is no data to <i>show</i> that this is a terrible idea. Perhaps that&#x27;s because not many would risk real money on implementing such a presumably terrible idea.<p>There are some known cases of drastic redesigns presumably killing a product. On the other hand, gradual redesigns as well as adding features incrementally are industry-wide standard practice. That process clearly works. Yes, users complain about changes. No, they generally won&#x27;t switch because of them. They may delay upgrades, but that generally happens with or without changes.