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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#341

Post by bsder »

reilly3000 wrote: post #221
pantulis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming. Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete. I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year…

I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to compromises for which a native UX would have been superior. Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind. Sure it’s a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the fus…

> I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated.

I don't.

Event loops, for example, work completely differently on macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. You will abstract across them eventually and you will get that abstraction wrong unless you are a programming god--at which point you might as well just use a cross-platform system to start.

The cross-platform guys have big companies with lots of money and programmers solving problems that you haven't even dreamed of. If you're releasing on multiple platforms, you will not win.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#342

Post by lucb1e »

alkonaut wrote: post #14

> ...in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product. The AWS recipe is easy though: add another service instead of touching the old one too much. Great now there are 200 services and approaching them is like learning C++. If one considers "the product" to be the entire offering of cloud services - I'd argue tha…

Indeed. The UX is so awful that I avoid AWS for more reasons than simply because it's Amazon's. The next sentence also has me scratching my head:

> I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook.

Has this person used the Amazon website? The UI looks much older than AWS. Which I don't mind, don't get me wrong, but it just surprises me for such a popular website, it really looks like the owners stopped updating it in the late 90s (and the search function works like something from the pre-google era as well). Amazon's shopping site is the last one I visit when I'm desperate and can't find it on normal sites, it's always a fun ride of page after page of "this is not what I looked for" and "even if your price field is a string this sort function should work better". No, it's not the geeks that let you not update the UX I think.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#343

Post by sflicht »

smichel17 wrote: post #324
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…

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…

What is wrong with having a lot of settings? I absolutely hate that Twitter does not let me turn off their "features", but rather only lets me say "see less often" (which of course does nothing because I told Twitter not to track my preferences etc, but probably doesn't do anything for anyone anyway, except maybe provide a datapoint for some poorly thought out ML algorithm they put in place).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#344

Post by equality_1138 »

grishka wrote: post #144
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'…

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

"A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example."

How else will all those SVP's at your bank justify their fat salaries? They NEED more minions. Same goes for VC ecosystem. Funny how everyone has a scapegoat or a solution to this supposed software quality problem, not quite understanding the underlying financial incentives. Easy money -> rotten management -> crappy design.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#345

Post by grishka »

emodendroket wrote: post #328
grishka wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kinds of changes? Operating systems are also feature-complete and don't need that yearly release cycle. They only need updating if there are new hardware capabilities that need to be exposed to applications. And security patches don't change APIs.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#347

Post by Dumblydorr »

I use Philips hue, they recently upgraded their Android app and it's much crappier of a user experience. The lights are far harder to control with more clicks, and all the graphical changes are a sidestep not an upgrade. Very sad update.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#348

Post by actually_a_dog »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> 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…

> The bigger problem is that nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase. Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look good on their resume going into the next job. Some of the most talented developers we hired were obviously only interested in using our company as a stepping stone to FAANG jobs (which didn't actually pay much more, but they were more prestigious on a resume so they wanted to switch).

This isn’t actually the developers’ fault, either. I think we need to blame the tech industry as a whole for this.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#349

Post by HKH2 »

mastazi wrote: post #231
mattbk1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a perfect world, all of those would work in an RSS reader.

Yes, true. I wish Spotify artists/playlists or Youtube channels etc. had RSS. So, the next idea would be a service that scrapes contents and builds an RSS feed.

YouTube does have RSS.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#350

Post by csydas »

ozzythecat wrote: post #298
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'…

> At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again I work at a tech company, and I’ll offer my take on why this didn’t happen. Some growth oriented organizations incentivize product people to keep iterating and “improving” a product. Then, product people are on the hook to show some kind of measurable improvement in some metric. Otherwise, they miss out on p…

>What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record.

While internally I nod my head and 'agree' that all the above points must be true, the lack of voices on why we have such seemingly random UI changes bothers me on this subject.

There must be tens of thousands, if not higher, of UI/UX designers, and while I struggle a little to believe that Product Management is in such a sorry shape that PMs feel the need to change for the sake of change, it's harder for me to believe that we don't hear more complaints/post-mortems from the UI/UX devs out there. Surely not everyone is under some iron-clad NDA or is so afraid of their employer they won't even try with some throwaway accounts to tell the story of Management's lust for changing UI...

The sad (specious) conclusion I reach is that UI/UX changes that seem bad probably have far more thought put into complaint articles than the UI/UX/PM team ever had with the change in the first place. Whatever the motivation or justification is, seems the real reason for a lot of the changes from such softwares is 'what're the users going to do about it?', in most cases, the company already has their money...why care if you already recouped the on-boarding cost and then some?

But again, just speculation.

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