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1. Warn users about major changes. Unexpected changes catch people off-guard and can provoke a defensive response. A simple message can set users’ expectations, for example: “Soon we’ll be introducing a redesigned site with new features to improve your experience. Stay tuned!”

2. Clearly communicate the nature and value of the changes. An explicit description can help users to appreciate the changes from your perspective. For example: “We’ve redesigned our site. It’s now cleaner to save you time. Here’s how it’ll help you…”. With framing like that, users will be less prone to change aversion, such as: “Ugh, it looks totally different. I don’t know why they did this, and I wish they hadn’t messed with it.”

3. Let users toggle between old and new versions. Giving users control over the timing of the change can cut down on feelings of helplessness. Allow them to play in the new sandbox before removing the old one.

4. Provide transition instructions and support. If a city changes its street layout, residents need a map of the new streets and a way to direct lost people to their destinations. The same principle applies for your product’s alterations.

5. Offer users a dedicated feedback channel. Without a way to connect with those responsible for the changes, users will vent publicly and further entrench their negativity. Users will respect you more if you actively solicit their opinions.

6. Tell users how you’re addressing key issues they’ve raised. This completes the feedback loop and assures users that their feedback is critical to prioritizing improvements. Try a simple message like: “We’ve been listening to your feedback about the changes we’ve made. Based on your comments, here’s what we’re doing…”

Early psychologist William James wrote about the power of habit, as if it were a giant flywheel keeping people in their respective social classes. The same effect applies to people's use of products, which generates substantial inertia over time. Any forced changes to well-established habits are prone to cause disruption, and significant effort to regain inertia.

 

The mere exposure effect, identified by Zajonc, showed that familiarity breeds liking. With technology, familiar designs and interactions have a natural advantage over new approaches, at least until a new version is used enough to reap the benefits of familiarity.

1. Warn users about major changes. Unexpected changes catch people off-guard and can provoke a defensive response. A simple message can set users’ expectations, for example: “Soon we’ll be introducing a redesigned site with new features to improve your experience. Stay tuned!”

2. Clearly communicate the nature and value of the changes. An explicit description can help users to appreciate the changes from your perspective. For example: “We’ve redesigned our site. It’s now cleaner to save you time. Here’s how it’ll help you…”. With framing like that, users will be less prone to change aversion, such as: “Ugh, it looks totally different. I don’t know why they did this, and I wish they hadn’t messed with it.”

3. Let users toggle between old and new versions. Giving users control over the timing of the change can cut down on feelings of helplessness. Allow them to play in the new sandbox before removing the old one.

4. Provide transition instructions and support. If a city changes its street layout, residents need a map of the new streets and a way to direct lost people to their destinations. The same principle applies for your product’s alterations.

5. Offer users a dedicated feedback channel. Without a way to connect with those responsible for the changes, users will vent publicly and further entrench their negativity. Users will respect you more if you actively solicit their opinions.

6. Tell users how you’re addressing key issues they’ve raised. This completes the feedback loop and assures users that their feedback is critical to prioritizing improvements. Try a simple message like: “We’ve been listening to your feedback about the changes we’ve made. Based on your comments, here’s what we’re doing…”

Early psychologist William James wrote about the power of habit, as if it were a giant flywheel keeping people in their respective social classes. The same effect applies to people's use of products, which generates substantial inertia over time. Any forced changes to well-established habits are prone to cause disruption, and significant effort to regain inertia.

The mere exposure effect, identified by Zajonc, showed that familiarity breeds liking. With technology, familiar designs and interactions have a natural advantage over new approaches, at least until a new version is used enough to reap the benefits of familiarity.

1: Aaron Sedley and Hendrik Müller. 2013. Minimizing change aversion for the google drive launch. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2351-2354. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2468767 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468767

Update 2: I came across an interesting paper in the IUI '14 proceedings that was citing the aforementioned Sedley and Müller paper on change aversion: "On user behaviour adaptation under interface change" by Rosman et al. This study is looking at how users learn and adapt to new user interfaces and it considers when the users are already used to an existing interface. They found that a change to a user interface can degrade user performance even when the change might be considered to result in a "better" interface. This study highlights the importance of having a good change management strategy when you make large changes to your software.

1: Aaron Sedley and Hendrik Müller. 2013. Minimizing change aversion for the google drive launch. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2351-2354. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2468767 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468767

2: Benjamin Rosman, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, M.M. Hassan Mahmud, and Pushmeet Kohli. 2014. On user behaviour adaptation under interface change. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 273-278. DOI=10.1145/2557500.2557535 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2557500.2557535

Update: I just was perusing the papers for CHI '13 and noticed that Aaron Sedly and and Hendrik Müller have published a paper on minimizing change aversion ("Minimizing Change Aversion for the Google Drive Launch" {1}). They measured user satisfaction with the new Google Drive on an extended Likert scale. I found this observation interesting:

Early psychologist William James wrote about the power of habit, as if it were a giant flywheel keeping people in their respective social classes. The same effect applies to people's use of products, which generates substantial inertia over time. Any forced changes to well-established habits are prone to cause disruption, and significant effort to regain inertia.

The mere exposure effect, identified by Zajonc, showed that familiarity breeds liking. With technology, familiar designs and interactions have a natural advantage over new approaches, at least until a new version is used enough to reap the benefits of familiarity.

The authors go on to note that they "developed a framework of actions to minimize change aversion", which included the steps I originally mentioned from the blog post.

1: Aaron Sedley and Hendrik Müller. 2013. Minimizing change aversion for the google drive launch. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2351-2354. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2468767 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468767