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Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#11

Post by npunt »

dredmorbius wrote: post #2

As the on-site support of a group of older and disabled users (sight, hearing, motor, coordination, cognitive), the failures of Apple's traditionally highly accessible designs are quite familiar to me. I'd written my own rant a few months back after discovering (usability error) that Apple's online feedback form couldn't ingest the full thing: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bs-wilowvb4-dvpfl_vruq

Thanks for sharing this, I've looked but haven't read enough on accessibility in real world use cases.

Have you tried the iPad with anyone there? It may ratchet down the complexity some, and the accessibility features are very good.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#12

Post by cm2187 »

narrator wrote: post #8
exabrial wrote: post #5

Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform. As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I open…

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software? What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later…

> How can they make money if you permanently own your software?

Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the churn for smartphones and tablets was a multiple of desktop pcs. Cars are a mature industry. You still have to replace your car regularly, but the new car doesn't go faster.

But I have the feeling Microsoft is even loosing their market share on laptops, everyone around me replaced their windows laptop with a mac. And despite being myself heavily invested in the windows ecosystem, I am very uncomfortable with their new OS and considering alternatives.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#13

Post by rcheu »

bcook wrote: post #7
TeMPOraL wrote: post #4

I'm gonna ask a different question - why Google is struggling to design useful software? It seems that every iteration of their every product loses functionality and is being dumbed down to the point of uselessness.

Can you share a few examples? Google seems to be leaning more toward "normal users" but I enjoy the software nonetheless. Are you sure you are the intended user? Catering to a different userbase might be their intent.

I think an obvious example is Hangouts. It's easily the worst messaging app I've used in years. It consistently fails at reliably delivering messages. It's very common for me to send a message on my laptop, and then have the response only show up on my phone, or vise versa. The read marker will often jump around, and people that just messaged me 3 minutes ago will have "last seen 5 hours ago" under their name.

Google chat was a product that reliably sent messages to people, told me if someone was online, and was fast, too.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#14

Post by RealCasually »

exabrial wrote: post #5

Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform. As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I open…

Does Google Docs or others allow anonymous authoring? I guess I'm not seeing the harm in requiring a free login.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#16

Post by maaarghk »

rcheu wrote: post #13
bcook wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a few examples? Google seems to be leaning more toward "normal users" but I enjoy the software nonetheless. Are you sure you are the intended user? Catering to a different userbase might be their intent.

I think an obvious example is Hangouts. It's easily the worst messaging app I've used in years. It consistently fails at reliably delivering messages. It's very common for me to send a message on my laptop, and then have the response only show up on my phone, or vise versa. The read marker will often jump around, and people that just messaged me 3 minutes ago will have "last seen 5 hours ago" under their name. Google…

That's interesting, I have the exact opposite experience. I use Hangouts regularly, on two Macs, a PC and on my Android phone and I have never experienced any of that stuff, except maybe the "last seen" being out of sync - but that's hardly a dealbreaker.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#17

Post by _Understated_ »

narrator wrote: post #8
exabrial wrote: post #5

Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform. As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I open…

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software? What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later…

I think we will be. It has stopped.

I just upgraded my "old" Dell Precision T5500 to a X99 hand-built machine with an NVMe SSD and so on and I was rather underwhelmed: It's not as fast as a 5 year jump in architecture would have been 10 years ago (if that makes sense!), not even close.

I think Moore's law is done already. Intel have slowed their speed improvements over the last several years and are getting rid of their tick-tock.

I think it's market maturity: Things are "fast enough" (yes there are always those that push the limits, like gamers) but I reckon there are more mums and dads that just want stuff to work and will hang onto it for years than those that demand the fastest every year.

In fact, something I see in forums now is that even gamers are hanging onto their "old" 2600k chips since they are still incredibly fast.

My feelings on the OS are that the OS is something I shouldn't have to deal with much... it's merely a vessel to launch my applications (Visual Studio and SQL Server mainly) so I don't need anything else as long as I can run my applications and it's secure enough (I am still on Win 8.1 with Start8).

I am willing to go out on a limb and say that many others will be the same and from personal experience, just in my own circle, they are:

Me: Upgraded my 2010 Precision to a new machine last month Wife: Upgraded her 6 year old MAC at Christmas Dad: Upgraded his 8 year old Win XP machine last year for a £300 Dell Brother: Still rocking a first gen Macbook Pro

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#18

Post by paulojreis »

The impression I have, in the humble projects and companies I work with, is that it's more related to the decision-makers.

So many features are added based on whims, decided on meeting rooms and based on engineers or managers gut feelings, that it actually seems normal for software to get complicated. If we tried to keep the new features somewhat restrained to things we actually are confident that users want (by doing user research!), maybe the piling of new features would slow down.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#19

Post by jamstruth »

Twisell wrote: post #9

Focusing on iTunes to argue that Apple can't design simple software anymore seems a little bit unfair, while on the other hand I understand that it might be the only Apple desktop software used by people who run on MS Windows. But still, it really not representative of the Apple ecosystem IMHO. 3D Touch on iOS for instance is a state of the art demonstration of how to transparently and smoothly add a layer of functio…

I seem to remember seeing a lot of commenters in the iPhoneSE announcement thread saying that they'd completely forgotten that 3DTouch even existed. It may be "smoothly" integrated but so much so that nothing has visibly changed, nothing to indicate that there is a new feature or where it's usable.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#20

Post by _0w8t »

The article mixes simple-to-use software with software which functionality is easy to discover. These are very different.

There is a lot of programs that are simple to use if one manages to discover the functionality. This is bad on mobiles where the desire to save on screen real estate often goes to far with no clues left that one can do something simply with a particular gesture. But even on desktop this has been bad starting with that MS Office interface when one has to search internet to discover how to do basic things. And MS has not learned the lesson and tried another undiscoverable interface with Windows 8. But at least discoverability is possible to fix if developers willing to listen to the users.

iTunes problem is different. It is a typical feature creep where new functionality makes it harder to use what was there before. This is difficult to fix as scalable interface that allows to do a lot of things in a simple way is a hard problem.

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