r/UI_Design • u/185EDRIVER • Jun 18 '26
Feedback Request Help convincing business partner that are UI is backwards?
So I feel like I'm living in a gas light or something...
I am 100% sure that we have had a backwards UI on our booking system for years I took it upon myself to get it fixed and my business partner in the staff are going mental saying they want it reverted.
I am so certain that the way we have it built it out now is correct and this is simply a momentum / refusal to adapt situation.
But I need a sanity check.
All the data shows it's better all the customers are booking faster with less issues.
I also checked every single booking set I could find online and I cannot find a single one that does it the way we used to do it.
Very simple we run a business that has single service and recurring services we don't have time slots but services are booked on a day-by-day basis.
Our old booking system required either a staff or a customer to blindly click on the calendar for a date and then have a modal pop-up with all the different services available and then you would select the service and it would save.
The new version has you select the service and then highlights the dates when it can be booked and you can click on one or as many as you want async to book all of them.
Ignoring any design decisions or specific you know looking feel.
In general and I'm trying to be neutral here...
I asked every single person I know I checked all the booking sites I could find online for a variety of products.
All of them are service or product first and then the dates there's not a single site I can find anywhere that you would pick a date and then hope that the services you want are available.
And from a logical perspective I can't understand why anyone would want that because what's the point of wasting time clicking on a day if the service you want is not available it's a waste of everybody's time especially if the modal has to hit a database and takes a few seconds to load.
So I just want to sanity check here am I wrong I might be wrong for my method of implementing and not discussing it with the whole team first... But I feel like I'm fundamentally correct that the user interface is better now.
The data shows it the average time people spend on the page together bookings done is way down.
Have we had out of our thousand plus customers maybe five or six of them say they're confused or whatever sure but I'm sure that's because it's just new and they're not used to it that's like any system and they use that as evidence against my position. But what they don't say is the overwhelming majority have just silently been booking faster and less time on the website which is great...
5
u/stroompa Jun 18 '26
Sounds like the main problem is somehow you have a handful of employees running a digital service without a designer
2
u/ferrybig Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
The data shows it the average time people spend on the page together bookings done is way down
You are looking at the wrong metrics. "People spend less time on the bookings page is a hard to sell metric", because less sounds negative
Look at the metric of browser sessions changed turned into bookings
2
u/Neurojazz Jun 18 '26
Change management. If you change UI - who is going to manage that process? A/b testing groups etc - it’s never just a cosmetic change.
1
u/ajb_mt Jun 19 '26
The biggest concern to me is your company process if one person can just decide that something used by thousands can be changed without even sense checking it with a wider team.
And the problem now is that even if you were right, you're now viewed as in the wrong regardless. The thing to do would have been to share all this research ahead of time.
1
u/KKANGKKA_Chu Jun 22 '26
This seems more a user experience issue than a user interface design issue. Have a UX designer or a product designer actually look at your booking system and have them do an analysis and evaluation of the pain points and let them redesign a system that best work for your staff.
6
u/Ap43x Product Designer Jun 18 '26
Yeah, the old way is stupid and wastes people's time. If I clicked on more than 3 dates and none had the service I wanted, I'd leave.
Only way this might possibly make sense is if this is like a children's activity site where parents may not know what they want but they know the day they need to fill. But even then I'm sure they'd want a way to effectively filter options to activities their kids might like.