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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#321

Post by lucb1e »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183
simonw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note. Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later" I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my no…

This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line that so many companies, including Google, try to push down our throats. Searching is only better than organizing if searches are exhaustive, and I can trust that they are exhaustive . My experience with variety of products, including Evernote, Google Drive and GMail, tells me I can't trust that. I had plenty of instances when I…

> I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line

From what I see around me, though, most people just do not have any digital organizing skills whatsoever. It's honestly exceptional that I meet someone who has files going back more than five years and those files are not on their desktop in a "previous computer" directory; and even that category of people includes only those with tech friends that helped them move the data over and set the new system up.

I don't disagree with you, but we might just be the minority.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#322

Post by strken »

city41 wrote: post #164
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 canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons. I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid . I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play…

There's a good unofficial Rust library for Spotify called librespot that powers some great terminal clients. I use ncspot and it's pretty good once you learn the weird quirks (e.g. song radio is buried deep in a context menu).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#323

Post by grishka »

emodendroket wrote: post #313
grishka wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a construction worker do when they complete a building?

A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.

Yes, sure. For online services, that would be all the people involved with maintaining infrastructure. But my point is that construction workers are no longer needed for that particular building once it's completed. Yet, somehow, apps and websites are never completed. They're always changing for no good reason.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#324

Post by smichel17 »

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…

Here's a short case study.

I am the maintainer of Red Moon, a FLOSS screen filter app for Android. Over a period of several years, the location of the toggle has moved from a switch at the top, to a switch and a floating action button (FAB), back to just a switch, and will soon move to just a FAB.

I can provide more detail later if someone would like, but the short of it is:

1) As other features changed (permission prompts and moving the growing number of settings to their own screen), one location or the other made more sense.

2) I thought I would like the single top switch better than a single FAB, but after using it for a while, I think the switch feels more confusing than fresh (the action bar is a nonstandard location for a switch).

Overall, I would say it's because design is really hard. But not like that! It's hard because when you spend so much time close to a system, you start to overthink things, and then second-guess yourself. So you can't trust your intuition, you need to listen to users with fresh eyes. But they're also telling you 5 different, conflicting things, and if you listen to everyone you'll have a settings section 9 miles long. You can try to rely on data, but that's mostly good for reaching a local maximum, not staying cohesive. The best designers are able to keep their "fresh eyes" even after working with the system for a long time.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#325

Post by omniscient_oce »

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…

Two nice native apps for MacOS that I like are Craft and Eagle.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#326

Post by valzam »

bluedino wrote: post #296

I have a Samsung TV and use the YouTube app every day. You can see when they update it, the fonts change, layout changes, etc. usually subtle stuff but sometimes there's a big change. Anyway, for a while they had the feature where you could hold the main button on the remote while on a video, and a context menu would pop up and you could save it to watch later. One day, that feature went away. So now you have to play…

> now you have to play the video, watch 1-2 ads

I think it's pretty obvious why they got rid of it...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#327

Post by lucb1e »

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…

I can't believe that I never realized having multiple parallel versions is even an option. Perhaps four sounds like a lot to maintain, especially multiplied by a number of OSes or if it's a complex software with many features, but more than one is definitely not a crazy proposal.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#328

Post by emodendroket »

grishka wrote: post #323
emodendroket wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.

Yes, sure. For online services, that would be all the people involved with maintaining infrastructure. But my point is that construction workers are no longer needed for that particular building once it's completed. Yet, somehow, apps and websites are never completed. They're always changing for no good reason.

But there are all kinds of code-level changes that end up being necessary, even if you never want any new features. You can't just have sysadmins and expect to run a service over the Internet.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#329

Post by lucb1e »

foxrider wrote: post #261

What I think is a key contributing factor here is that we lost the ability to say "no" to updates. Before the modern era of appstores users could refuse to update the app and in doing so throw a wrench into company's plans to just ruin the user experience.

> we lost the ability to say "no" to updates

we... did?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#330

Post by slig »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #233
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…

I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all. I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.

Looks like they optimized the hell of it to push shitty podcasts and local and popular artists.
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