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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#271

Post by BoxOfRain »

collinvandyck76 wrote: post #172

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 reque…

There'll never be a time I won't be up for a bit of Jira-bashing! Can't stand the bloody software, chiefly because it's an unstable mess of a product that perfectly recreates the soupy grottiness of a hangover every time you use it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#272

Post by cfeliped »

Enterprise stuff is also guilty of that.

I'm a sysadmin and the amount of times Office 365 security admin pages has changed in the last year's is madening. AWS's UI sucks hairy balls (e.g.: security group links) but at least is stable.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#273

Post by noptd »

rl3 wrote: post #141
vlunkr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's just the nostalgia talking. Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features.

> Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features. The radio feature used to be a fantastic tool for exploration. Now it just feeds you your existing music preferences.

Sounds like Spotify is going down Pandora's path then.

It's amazing how several different stations started from the same genre will narrowly converge even after explicitly disliking different subgenre-specific songs on each station. But that's been Pandora for years now; why I still revisit it time to time is beyond me.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#274

Post by robocat »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #107

Hallelujah. I at least give praise to the PMs that make it easy for experienced users to keep their UI. I mean, if reddit ever gets rid of old.reddit.com, I'll have to find a new link aggregation forum. On the contrary, Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups", and I hate it. Had to search around for a bunch of esoteric chrome flags settings, but even after applying those i couldnt get back to individual tabs.

> Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups"

The “tabs” feature is such a borked UI. I suspect they added tab groups to try and “improve” the tabs feature, but they definitely stuffed it up even worse!

Closing a tab is now horribly inconsistent and multiple clicks (plus swipes if in landscape) - arrrgh. To close a tab, the best option is now to long press the [n] tab icon (next to the vertical ellipsis), which pops up a “X close” menu option (a fairly hidden feature).

The new tabs UI is so painful I did investigate other browser options.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#275

Post by andrekandre »

aduitsis wrote: post #64

A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as regards their UI, with the usual set of UI widgets such as text boxes, dropdown lists, radio boxes, buttons, etc. These widgets are available in any toolkit or browser in highly polished and performant implementations that require very little from the developer in terms of fiddling with the UI. So…

  Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area.
big sur right there:

plain white/black windows with no divider line, yet you can only drag from the tiny sliver of the now non-visible bar at the top

same thing happens when a dialog appears, you can only drag from that tiny little sliver even though the whole window is darkened... ugh

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#276

Post by [deleted] »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #195
godelski wrote: post #177

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…

Fashion. Also, in my industry, if you're software is not visibly changing, people assume its dead and no longer supported, not going anywhere. People want to feel like they are part of something that is going somewhere. Software is not a tool, its a journey into the future!

[deleted]

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#277

Post by dcoo »

epistasis wrote: post #155
ardit33 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems very plausible, as an outsider looking in. There's also the problem of when new people get hired and out in charge of new sections of the product, and they feel that they either need to make a change to justify their existence, or that they have found something that really works well for the way that they use the product without realizing the variety of ways that the user base uses the product.

It's already been happening I think. One of the core members of the team who built the music recommendation features left a few years ago https://notes.variogr.am/2016/11/16/leaving-spotify-the-echo...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#278

Post by ksec »

> At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn’t take pictures much any more. I miss them.

Oh What a time to bring this up. Just when I am losing confidence in Apple. iMoves and iPhotos, I remember the backlash in 2008 / 2009. But everyone ( including myself ) were too focused on iPhone we sort of brush aside those mistakes. And to be fair iPhone was far more important.

Just reading this I feel bad for GrandMa.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#279

Post by irrational »

kowlo wrote: post #22
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…

What was wrong with VSCode?

That’s it’s not IntelliJ? Honestly, it’s not bad, but I think the price is the main thing it has going for it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#280

Post by srcreigh »

Are there any PMs or devs out there who A/B test many/most bug fixes or performance improvements?

In principle, a minor bug fix and a feature aren't all that different. There's a control experience and a new experience, and an A/B test can compare their performance.

In practice, I find many features are run with stat sig analysis of their impact, whereas UX bugs are either not fixed (not important enough) or fixed, without measuring their impact.

Of course experience-breaking bugs should be deployed at 100%. But what about all those UX bugs that are in a flow which is shipped and kinda working already?

Wouldn't it be interesting to see that a UX "fix" actually performs worse? Or, wouldn't it be nice to know when a UX fix produces a measurable performance increase?

My anecdote: A scrolling bug on a mobile web sign-in page. It's 1 field form - email address. On mobile web, you can't scroll to see the email field when you have the on-screen keyboard open. This page is the top of funnel for a promotional offer via ads. It's obviously broken, but it's already shipped and (surprisingly?) actually kinda working. Would you fix it at 100% rollout, or do it via an experiment, or not fix it? Why?

Curious if anybody has other experiences to share about this idea :-)

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