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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#171

Post by ec109685 »

oakfr wrote: post #80
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> 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…

Fait point. I would also add: blame the AB test culture that has creeped in everywhere. I am pretty confident that the current layout of the Spotify UI is not the result of a design team but the outcome of hundreds of back-to-back AB tests (some of them coming out positive, to the benefit of the career of the ideator)

Good point. There's huge praise when an A/B test shows positive results. "Ship it, we've made the world better!"

So that feedback loop is going to incentivize short term thinking and small changes that might not be beneficial to the whole.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#172

Post by collinvandyck76 »

I can't think of a better example of this than JIRA. I remember installing it on-prem about twenty years ago. Pretty simple, easy to get around, pretty quick. Now, it is a towering behemoth of feature and I dread using it.

For example, when you load the kanban view, when you re-focus the window, the tasks jump and bounce around, even if there's no change. I think that when the window gets focused, the front-end requests the latest data and then repaints it. Why repaint if the data has not changed?

Another example is links. We add a lot of links in our tickets, and I'm always frustrated at how difficult it is to interact with them. When an issue page loads, it kicks off these async things which fetch the link data, and eventually renders them into some kind of first-class link div. The problem is that if you click on the link before the async call finishes and updates the link element, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. If the link does work, and you control click it, it will sometimes not open in a new tab, but instead in the current window. Which means that when you go Back,you have to wait again for the link to render.

I respect that a lot of people are big JIRA fans, but I can't help but wonder if my experience is unique, or if nobody at Atlassian really uses it in anger.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#173

Post by randomdata »

grishka wrote: post #144
sushisource wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

In my experience, bank software (customer facing) could use a development team.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#174

Post by pbronez »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #50
Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

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…

I’m also frustrated by this change. Very annoying that you can’t see all the songs by an artist.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#175

Post by conradfr »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> 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 average two years turnover also means that devs don't maintain their own code, which is a crucial way to improve as a developer.

No wonder they don't want to work on someone else's code, they don't even want to work on their own old code :)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#176

Post by nimvlaj30 »

donatzsky wrote: post #76
kowlo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with VSCode?

That it's an Electron app, mostly.

It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life, honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would expect from the same software written natively.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#177

Post by godelski »

sushisource wrote: post #104
Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

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…

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'…

I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hintings that people have been relied on.

So, the big question is: why? Good design is hard and often underappreciated. I don't want to convey that idea. But why do things like this happen so often? Changes that don't actually provide any more utility. Changes that remove utility. It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it. Often backend people say that it is just done to justify their existence but I don't buy this because there are plenty of good design features that can be constantly worked on and improved. Is there some psychological effect this has on users because it is once again novel? So often we don't see good design improvements but things that just come off as "change because change." Why? Help me understand.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#178

Post by grishka »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> 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…

I'm an Android developer who despises Kotlin and all the other trendy stuff. I often get laughed at for my views. However, my apps are ridiculously slim and fast, so there's that. Oh and I don't have a job.

It really feels to me as if developers these days care much more about the development process itself, and how their code looks, than about the end product of their work that the users see. Same for designers — they want their UIs look "clean" and enjoyed like works of art, disregarding obvious, glaring UX issues that arise when any person at all tries to use the thing.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#179

Post by ttepasse »

egypturnash wrote: post #48
eplanit wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…

God this is every media app, try organizing your e-books in a pleasing fashion someday. You just can’t.

It's even worse when media apps are coupled with a store and the cloud. I'm using Apple's iBooks/Books.app as an ePub reader on Mac OS. Searching the library always lands you in the Store portion of the app. The app always forgets the sorting order of the library. And 90 % of the time my epubs are not on the device but uploaded into iCloud; even the placeholder entry is missing its thumbnails. The best way to use Books.app as an ePub reader is to store the books in the file system and delete them from Books.app after reading. But because Books.app is there and free there aren't quality alternative ePub reader for Mac OS anymore.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#180

Post by jpeter »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

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…

They changed the location of the "New playlist" button for no reason. The old location was perfect.
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