151–160 of 635 posts
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OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop. And it's becoming quite competitive in mobile and touch interfaces, too.
> OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop Where? OSS is consistently a mish-mash of unfinished ideas.
- Analytics packages need to shrink. Most can be under 5kb, but rarely are.
- excessive event tracking and demanding items like scroll listeners need to die
- Ad tracking is completely nonchalant about speed, and oftentimes chains dozens of tags (or hundreds to thousands for header bidding)
Analysts can save the day by tracking the right metrics:
- time and clicks in navigation should be tracked and optimized for minimal use. Get users to content fast.
- rage buttons. No lengthy surveys, just allow users to indicate they are angry at a feature. Count the times it gets clicked per location.
- Optimize towards retention signals first. They matter far more than conversions. Look at the usage patterns of users that don’t return and/or churn. The top-line funnel will sing if users are pleased with the UX. This matters as much for desktop tools as it does for SaaS.
- Each deployment with UX implications deserves tagging and long-term measurements. Look for how long it takes users to adapt to changes, and not just when it’s brand new. More clicks is probably worse, don’t brag about that.
- Sometimes a longer session means more contented usage, but often it means more frustration.
- pay close attention to engagement with settings UX. That’s where people go when the UX isn’t right.
- Give users some access to the dashboards you look at, if feasible. I’m a firm believer that people being measured should be able to observe some form of what is derived from that data. If PMs exist to improve user engagement, engage them in the process. Two-way mirrors, whether virtual or physical, are creepy AF.
> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…
the incentives in the industry are wrong: - ideally, the best thing to do is do nothing, but that doesn't get recognition. hence people are always itching to tamper around.
I wonder though, whether b2b software also suffers from this, because such software isn't really made for public recognition and etc. in the first place.
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Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...
The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer folks... As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and the most boring features survive. Ps. I was one of…
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> OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop Where? OSS is consistently a mish-mash of unfinished ideas.
Blender 2.8+ has done a pretty good job. I think in general OSS UX is pretty bad, but there are some stand-out exceptions.
Most people have chrome/edge/firefox/whatever warmed up on their machine. Opening a new tab to spotify.com takes under a second, assuming you are using any caching at all. Opening an electron app cold is almost certainly going to take longer and hurt your system resources more.
I feel like Spotify is a case where native desktop app doesn't make as much sense as something like Discord, where you do need a lot of native hooks for the 2-way nature of the product.
The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…
Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their…
The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…
Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their…
From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel.
Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. If I could figure out how to port ten thousand songs in a 150 playlists...
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I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…
We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex... So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.