In particular, the people doing the redesign often seem to not understand what made the first design successful/effective, and senselessly wreck parts without even realizing. I’m not sure if this is because they understand the problem less than the original designers, the institutional incentives are set up poorly to encourage high quality work, increased system complexity / technical debt is harder to work around, institutional complexity makes it harder for competent people to be in position to make the decisions, the original successes were partly down to luck and reversion to the mean dooms follow-ups to mediocrity, recent UI fashions are generically user hostile, or what... but whatever it is, it’s very frustrating.
And that’s not even mentioning the inevitable bugs and glitches.
There’s probably some selection bias involved too. Those products and redesigns which are amazing and wonderful get used, but nobody thinks too hard about all the ways in which they are better. On the other hand when redesigns negatively affect customers, the bad experience is unpleasantly memorable.
It's like rewriting a codebase. There's so much tacit understanding of the actual problem inherent in a living design/codebase. All that nuance gets obliterated because someone got a bee in their bonnet about better code/cleaner design.
And that’s not even mentioning the inevitable bugs and glitches.
There’s probably some selection bias involved too. Those products and redesigns which are amazing and wonderful get used, but nobody thinks too hard about all the ways in which they are better. On the other hand when redesigns negatively affect customers, the bad experience is unpleasantly memorable.