One fine evening, drained after weeks of productive winter vacation, I suddenly wondered about KLMS, and how it was doing after Flash got terminated. I typed the address of our beloved learning platform in my browser, but the page that greeted me was different from the one that I knew all too well from my two and a half years at KAIST. For a few seconds, I was half admiring the artwork on the landing page, half trying to work out where the login button was. Personal UI/UX comments aside, I found out a few days later that other people also had similar complaints: unintuitive UI, missing features, and lousy translation. That got me thinking, why do we hate the new KLMS so much when this newer interface might be “better” on paper?

Perhaps you still remember the outrage over the new Instagram interface in 2016, or the Reddit redesign in 2018. A more familiar example might be Google’s continuous logo updates, including the major change from its signature serif font to a more modern sans-serif style in 2015. Internet users raged over how the new logo looked “oversimplified”, “generic”, or “like it was designed by a five-year-old”. Starting from around 2010, there seemed to be a trend of minimalistic designs with sans-serif fonts. Besides Google, several other big companies, such as Yahoo, Spotify, and Netflix, jumped on the bandwagon. Each rebrand was always met with dismissive remarks not much different from the public’s response to Google’s change at first, but now we are pretty much comfortable with these “boring” interfaces. No one seems to complain about them anymore. Indeed, if everyone really did hate this flat design trend so much, how come it still prevails more than ten years later?

Moving on from UI, do you remember when Apple launched the first AirPods? Everyone made fun of its shower head-like design, astonishingly high price, and poor sound quality-to-price ratio. In its early days, it looked nothing more than EarPods with their wires cut, and the only people who wore them were rich Apple fans. But not too long after that, Samsung created the first Galaxy Buds to take on the AirPods, and soon after other lesser-known companies launched their own version of wireless earbuds — suddenly, wired earbuds were the ones out of fashion. Moving back in time even further, there were the good old days when QWERTY and touch screen smartphones were first introduced. As a fifth-grader who got her first cell phone only two years earlier, I used to think that QWERTY phones were ugly, and touchscreen phones were just a gimmick. Around that age too, I recall my mom’s casual remark of how phone cameras were next to useless, considering how low their resolution was compared to digital cameras. I could only wonder if it ever crossed her mind that smartphone cameras would be ten times more powerful than digital cameras ten years later. When she was my age, did she ever think that Kodak would go out of business?

If these inventions are indeed as bad as people’s first impressions make them seem to be, how are they now an essential part of everyone’s life? Why would researchers work decades after decades to design them, and giant companies shell out billions of dollars to fund them? Is technology a mistake? I bet everyone knows the answer to that. I don’t think any millennial would fancy living with flip phones, floppy disks, and CRT monitors for the rest of their lives. I was one of the people who loathed Instagram and Google’s UI change at first, but looking back, I definitely don’t want them to keep their old designs in this day and age. I am now also enjoying the comfort of touchscreen smartphones and wireless earbuds that I used to make fun of. I wasn’t necessarily fond of older technology, but losing the interfaces and items that I grew up with felt like losing a part of my life that I don’t want to forget. Perhaps this is also why we complain about the new KLMS as if we loved the old one (which we didn’t, I bet). But just like how we eventually get used to generic flat designs and new gadgets, I believe we will get used to the new KLMS and technologies that are yet to come once we are ready to let go of the past.

Novelty is, and will always be, a part of our lives. History has taught us that the ones who refused novelty were the ones who were left behind. There is an endless list of once famous figures and companies who faded into obscurity after failing to adapt to changing trends. Unless you want to (literally) live under a rock, the best we can do is to embrace the hard truth that the world as we know it will always try to improve itself, for better or worse.