Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#51

Post by intellent » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #37

makbol wrote: post #5

Facebook

Really? How so? The page loads fairly quickly for me, and the design is highly optimized. Not optimized for users, mind you, but optimized for profitability. If you don't like Facebook, that's one thing but it's hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.

The Desktop browser version of Facebook is slow af. It almost feels like they are loading every single HTML element with yet another API request.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#52

Post by logicalmike » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

caleblloyd wrote: post #30

Skype

I second this.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#53

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

makbol wrote: post #5

Facebook

Definitely this one. Buggy as hell for simple workflows of uploading pics, on mobile version (web, hell will freeze before I will again install any of their apps in my phone) chat/messenger gets added/removed randomly so I can/can't respond to messages.

I did accept their initial scaling issues/crashes/broken functionality in say 2005-2008, but this web is unbelievably shitty even in 2018. 'Feature' of these days - when I find finally something interesting and worth commenting on, often clicking on Comment reloads whole part of the feed with the article never to be seen again, ever. Sometimes this happens also while just scrolling down, unbelievably frustrating. Unless I manually go to feed of given user. What an utter failure for such a highly valued company with basically 1 single product.

They need proper competition, we users would only benefit from this. Too bad Google Plus is insignificant, Google's way of building reliable software is on completely different level than FB.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#54

Post by humanrebar » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

lima wrote: post #8

JIRA and Confluence...

A good design is as simple as possible but no simpler. The problem with ticketing and document authoring platforms are that they are arbitrarily complex. I have some sympathy for Atlassian on managing the complexity of these things. We could say that they should limit their features better, but predicting the cost of adding another use case to a pile of them is not a solved problem.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#55

Post by zerostar07 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #45

zerostar07 wrote: post #18

ebay

I shop a lot on Ebay, I think it really works well.

it's slow as hell, clunky interface , hidden options, bouncing from one page to another in apparently different designs and versions. The seller interface is quite terrible, but even the shopping experience is pretty outdated.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#56

Post by jenscow » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

Any URL ending with .aspx

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#57

Post by caleblloyd » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

caleblloyd wrote: post #30

Skype

To add to that, most business conferencing solutions in general are pretty bad: Skype for Business, WebEx, and Google Meet. Have seen a big pickup in Zoom which is decent.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#58

Post by mabbo » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #48

mabbo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How so? The page loads fairly quickly for me, and the design is highly optimized. Not optimized for users, mind you, but optimized for profitability. If you don't like Facebook, that's one thing but it's hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed.

> Not optimized for users It's slow and buggy and awful to use on most Android phones for most of history. It sucks the CPU and battery while you're not using it and slows your whole phone down. > hardly fair to say they're slow or poorly designed. No it's completely fair and totally true. The Facebook apps are really badly designed and so are the websites.

Ah maybe that's what I'm missing- I don't use their app. The mobile website mostly works well for me. They removed messaging from it because they're jerks, but you can switch the desktop mode and it works.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#59

Post by andechs » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

CA Agile Central (Rally) - Enjoy the mystery of why you can only view 5 defects in a very small iframed area plopped on the page.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#60

Post by humanrebar » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

nwatson wrote: post #49

lima wrote: post #8

JIRA and Confluence...

Slack et al work great for arguing and discussing, but confluence is the best Wiki for recording long term conclusions and providing long term structure for projects. Google Docs is a jumbled atrocity by comparison ... confluence linking and navigation just work.

If it's just for devs, I like GitHub Enterprise wikis and readmes.