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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#241

Post by RachelF »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #214
jonplackett wrote: post #109

I watched a ted talk ages ago and it stuck with me (Sorry I forget which, maybe this one https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi... , please correct me if I’m wrong) It said that researchers tried for ages, and at great expense, to find ‘the perfect’ pasta sauce and couldn’t do it. No-one would ever all agree. It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions and different people would find each p…

They can actually afford building several versions: one for revular joe user, and one highly customisable power users. They can even allow (gasp) plugins! I mean, Winamp had skins and plugins more than 20 years ago. Surely it isn't some hopelessly lost skill, like making the roman concrete or the greek fire?!

nope, but big companies are more arrogant now, they know best, and the user has less choice.

Skins might also get in the way of showing ads.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#242

Post by dev_tty01 »

Audible. Just let me start listening to my book. Don't force me into "Discover" every time I open the app. Discover requires a network access and keeps me from doing anything else until it times out if my connection is not good. It could show me Discover when I close a book I just finished. That would make sense and not be intrusive and rude. No, they have to shove the monetization attempt in my face over and over. What PM made these choices? Geez.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#243

Post by nickkell »

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 was very sorry to notice Spotify getting worse and worse. It seems that now the app won’t display anything without an internet connection, or certain items that were downloaded don’t appear in the list. What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?

The desktop app is also getting worse. After a certain period of time clicking play simply has no effect, so it needs to be regularly restarted.

I don’t normally enjoy these pile-ons complaining about a product, but I have the feeling it’s coming apart at the seams

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#244

Post by TeMPOraL »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #158
TeMPOraL wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see individual songs anymore :(

That may be just it. I've been a paid pro user for almost a decade (back before and when their app was good); I ultimately abandoned my subscription when I realized I don't use the service much anymore (something about them suddenly losing quite a lot of mainstream-ish music).

That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#245

Post by [deleted] »

Sanguinaire wrote: post #129
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…

The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.

[deleted]

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#246

Post by ttepasse »

coldtea wrote: post #79
j-pb wrote: post #9

The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…

> But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...

Panic for years is rather open how they can't operate profitable on iOS and as a result discontinued many of their great iOS apps. The fear is that the Mac app market goes the same way like the iOS App Store.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#247

Post by g_p »

godelski wrote: post #177
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'…

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 hinti…

I do wonder if to some extent the inherently subjective nature of UX/UI design is what keeps it forever going? Designers want to stay employed and not just become a "bring in one-time at the start" contractor, so they justify changes through continual enhancement or similar, assuming the current solution may be one of a few local optima rather than the global optimum.

Lacking objective numerical comparison, perhaps designers and product teams attempt to do metrics-based comparison from telemetry (we raised metric X by changing the design). That leads to an ever changing design that tries to optimise for business objectives, rather than what the user wants.

Backend code can be optimised and honed and improved with objective measurements (CPU cycles used, latency, perceived performance, download time for user), but design doesn't give these.

In saying that though, rewrites in new languages and frameworks do seem to be becoming the problem for backend - optimisation isn't seem as exciting or career advancing, I guess... Few are optimising code for performance these days though, I'd wager - everyone just assumes your user won't mind your software using 15% of their CPU when sitting idle.

Maybe it is just as simple as that metrics individuals are measured on for job performance?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#248

Post by bartread »

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…

The mobile app is also appalling. The Apple CarPlay integration is shonky and seems like it's intentionally designed to ensure you inadvertently kill yourself in an auto accident.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

grishka wrote: post #203
topkai22 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for ret…

> Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now. A rather pop…

> Where did we make the wrong turn?

We force companies to grow, I guess.

All of the bullcrap the banks are doing mostly serves one purpose: get you to buy more of their products at terms that are bad for you.

All the complaints I have against the UX of the banking websites and apps I use can be attributed to this: they do a shitty job on purpose, because the site/app is primarily a vector to upsell you loans, credit cards and insurance.

(All complaints except one: the bank I used for my business accounts when contracting decided to make an SPA with one of the trendy JavaScript frameworks. Well, they botched it. This failure doesn't even help them sell anything, it's just the usual webdev incompetence.)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#250

Post by qwertox »

These last three hours I was fighting with a health app which is supposed to be the software counterpoint of a Bluetooth weight scale.

It simply did not work. And the reviews on Google Play were 1 star reviews, because the app simply stopped working.

I wasn't using this app for years, since I've written a Python script to read out the scale via a Raspberry Pi, but I wanted to change some weight thresholds in the scale, which my script didn't support, so I installed the app, after two years of not using it.

I think this app messed up the scale. It connected once, then never again. I even installed versions from 2 years ago, assuming that at least that would work. It didn't. I've tried this with 3 different phones. Pixel, Motorola, Xiaomi. No success. I've rebooted the phones several times.

So I searched for the Bluetooth codes which were responsible for setting these thresholds in the scale, and added them to the script. The script worked fine and did set the new values.

But now I have the issue that the Raspberry Pi often fails at connecting to the scale. It's annoying, but at least the scale has a buffer for several measurements, and once it can connect, it downloads all the measurements.

For others this simply means to throw away the scale or use it offline. Granted, it was a cheap one at around 15 €, but that's no reason to break things.

I'm currently so angry at this.

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