If people load up your app and it looks like it was last updated in 2007 they're going to be immediately put off.
Apps Getting Worse
331–340 of 635 posts
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#332Audible. 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. W…
I can recommend using one of the options mentioned here https://askubuntu.com/questions/16918/how-to-listen-to-audib...
Turning them into regular audio files and using your favorite player and having proper backups of the files is so much nicer. I'd straight up not use Audible if that was not an option, it's just not worth it.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#333Earlier 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…
It's always been hot garbage. From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel. Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. I…
>Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android
I bet that they all use macOS and their app macOS is really really shitty as well.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#334Earlier 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…
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 p…
> 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).
This seems to be addressed by one of my complaints. Was this feature not tested before pushed out to users?
I get that design is difficult. Anyone saying otherwise is biased. But it seems like a big problem is just trying something out first. Design can take months of use to realize something is bad. It seems like what should be done is: create new UI; use internally and push to everyone's version, use for a few weeks to a month; push to beta and get user feedback and pay attention to web traffic like HN and Reddit complaints about the new design; then decide if it should be pushed or not. I've seen apps that seem to follow this but just push despite bad user feedback and bad internal feedback. Going through the motions isn't enough, it has to be used as iterations.
> 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.
A good piece of advice I heard was "listen to users for problems. Don't listen to users for solutions." Because people are actually really good at identifying problems. But most people are really terrible at solving problems (I mean if they were good at it we wouldn't have 90% of the problems we do). The addendum is to only take solution advice from experts that understand more of the nuance of what you're doing, but then to still be careful.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...
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…
Didn't they rewrite the client to share more code between the ballooning number of devices they're supporting?
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#336The 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…
My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.
Exactly, never listened to a podcast on their app and never will, yet they keep pushing that shit.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#337Earlier 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.
I agree about the radio, but "similar artists" is still pretty reliable ime.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
There are objective measurements that can be done, but they’re difficult/expensive to do effectively. Like, “How many interactions/seconds does it take our users to find X?” It’s difficult because you have to know what “X” a user was looking for, which requires some varying degree of asking lots of users and reading those responses to be accurate. Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and or…
> Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and organizationally, even though it produces awful software.
Engagement is such a terrible metric. I'm not saying it should be thrown out, but it is classic example of Goodhart's Law[0]. Rage is engagement. Too much reliance on engagement is what got social media into a race to the bottom. That's not the mark of a quality product.
Measuring is hard, you're right. But if you're going to use bad measurements (which often is our only choice) they shouldn't be targets. We should understand where they fail and use the information accounting for that, not ignoring it.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#339The 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 mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the most critical to everyday user experience. The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security. Nor is…
In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> meet its business goals I don't want to work at a place that has "business goals". I don't want to work on a proprietary product either. I just want to use my skills to make the world a better place, and moving money around ain't that. I don't want to participate in the rat race or help it in any shape or form.
Your unprovoked comment about not having a job read like you were desiring one.
I am indeed desiring one, but I'm too picky. And it's not for the money, but rather mostly for socialization (I'm lonely af). Maybe I'd work at a startup, but there aren't many of those that would want an open-source app, and there are even fewer that do something legitimately useful instead of inventing a problem and then heroically solving it.
I worked at VKontakte (Russian social network) and was the only Android developer for several years. It was amazing when Pavel Durov was still the CEO. I was living the dream. It all went downhill form there when it was acquired by mail.ru group and I had to quit because it started feeling like an abusive relationship. My app being closed-source didn't help either.
Then was Telegram. Same Pavel, mostly same team, but the tasks were much more ambitious, and the product itself much more complex and internally intertwined (every single update touches the chat screen, which in the Android app is more than a megabyte of pure Java). I did the VoIP library from scratch. In hindsight, this certainly isn't a one-person endeavor, but I didn't know any better. So, yeah, eventually, but very unexpectedly, I was fired by that same person who I was a huge fan of for so many years. The reasoning was that "our calls are shit". Apparently I was supposed to write code that didn't contain bugs and just "test it myself". Oh all those foolish other companies having QAs, right?
I have no idea where to go now. I want my 2011 back. I want to be passionate about something again.