Keeping old terms and layout habits lowers migration cost

What it is

The hardest parts of an old model are words and places: whether the object is called Project or Workspace, whether the main action lives on the left or beside the object. During migration, keeping old words and leaving key entries where old habits will guess reduces friction more than “fixing IA on redesign day.” This is compatibility, not delta copy. Delta copy tells people what changed; compatibility decides what will deliberately stay so old skills still hit.

Why it happens

Retrieval and pointing depend on labels and spatial anchors. After a rename, the old word remains the index in memory; the new word needs a translation to reach the object, and translation is skipped under load, so people report “the feature is gone.” Layout is the same: the hand already goes top-left; if the entry lives only in top-right More, the first miss freezes as “the redesign lost it.” Keeping is not refusing to evolve. It is splitting rename and move out of “must happen the same day as the visual redesign.” Same-day reskin plus rename plus move explodes conflict points; a delta list cannot be finished. Reskin first, with words and places still old, and most old skills still connect; word and place changes can be batched per conflict, one teachable delta at a time. Aliases (old name in parentheses) are a weak form of keeping: the new word is present, the old index still hits.

Where it stops holding

Old words that are insulting, legally wrong, or in conflict with accessible names cannot be kept; they must change, with a stronger-than-usual delta at the old entry. Competitor words blocked by trademark cannot sit in the UI; they may appear only in a one-shot migration note. For users who never saw the old word, two names side by side long-term become noise; keeping needs a retirement date, after which the old name lives only as a search synonym. On phones that cannot keep dual entries, make sure search still hits the old word.

Applying it

• Split “reskin / rename / move” into three columns on the redesign list; default to different ship days; allow only one hard conflict class on the same day.
• During transition, alias key objects (UI or search) so searching “project” still finds what is now called workspace.
• Keep the old location discoverable for the main-path entry during transition, even if a new location already exists visually.
• Verify by having old-version users do a familiar task with no delta copy. If the first failure is “can’t find that word / hand to empty space,” pull the word or place change out of this redesign, or add aliases and an old-place entry.

Related

• Within the group: H2.11.1 Migrating users need the delta, not a from-zero lesson · H2.11.3 Forcing a newbie tour angers people who already know the product · H2.11.4 A migration window needs a comparison or a way back
• Adjacent: G1.08 Terminology consistency · G2.07 Navigation consistency · H2.05 Feature Discovery
• Search terms: legacy labels · layout compatibility · migration friction