251–260 of 635 posts
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…
> 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…
> iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift Swift is hardly new anymore... are you going to maintain an ObjC codebase in perpetuity?
What's the objective benefit of rewriting something already working into a different language?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd imagine their metrics are aligned with user behaviour, not experience.
Given so many metrics are either time or attention based, they probably are opposed to user experience (less time needed to achieve the task).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Most of the time it's for inner achievements for the product manager or designers part. Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views. It can also redesigned to match style updates, useful for fashion, travel or wedding sites. Sometimes the menu increases that a list of buttons can't accommodate anymore so it's changed to it's own page or drop-down. Sometimes they want people to be conf…
> Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views.
This one specifically irritates me. Even under the assumption that that new lead is correct and the new interface is cleaner and more usable, it still needs to be weighed against the time it takes to retrain users to the new format. You have to deal with what you were given. You can't just burn Rome to the ground, rebuild it in a day, and expect everything to be fine. For the love of god, at least do testing to show that this the cost doesn't outweigh the benefits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd imagine their metrics are aligned with user behaviour, not experience.
Or rather, they're trying to align user behaviour. Since customers have very little choice in the matter (most popular SaaS products tend to resist commodification, so there's no equivalent competitor to jump to), these metric-driven approaches often effectively become PID controllers, driving user behaviours to a desired trajectory.
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…
I would fine tune that conclusion a bit: it's not that everybody each had their own different individual preference particular to them. It's that there really were specific, objective answers and that it wasn't specific to the individuality of each and every person. But the "right" answer wasn't one but three or four different right answers. But importantly, there weren't Zero right answers, and there weren't infinity. There were three or four.
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…
They all sound like band names, which shows the passion, that went into these endaveours!
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.
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…
All I can imagine is that there is some confusion at Spotify and the developers must have the sign backwards, thinking that research findings are what not to do. It’s a consistently shitty experience.
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'…
Very hard to get anything meaningful done.