Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apps Getting Worse

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 635 posts

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#371

Post by torgian »

g_p wrote: post #247
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…

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…

Well, take a look at fashion design. Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. But designs for clothing always keeps changing, even if they are small, subtle changes.

I think you can apply the same towards design of anything. Tastes change. While a certain design philosophy might be a godsend in 2010, it might be considered trash in 2015.

To be fair, I also think a lot of design decisions are poorly made, and a lot of businesses make poor user experiences.

Just like female jeans that have tiny pockets.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#372

Post by taeric »

I'd change the closing from "we need to stop breaking software" to "we need to stop breaking processes".

This is a point of stability that Knuth tried highlighting, but gets panned for. Once a piece of foundational software is released, it has to remain stable not just in "doesn't crash" but in "doesn't change."

Common Lisp gets this right to an amusing degree by how much extension can be provided in user space. The lesson being that the less you do in the core offering, the more folks can depend on it? Maybe. Not sure, with how much that offering actually does.

I do think "enable your users" should be more the focus. Not "control your users so that they do what you think they should be doing."

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#373

Post by savanaly »

samb1729 wrote: post #24
eplanit wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…

My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which matched. Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now: - The Grand Tour - The Grand Tour…

Just another point of data to help comments reader avoid selection bias: If I search "Stand up comedy" on prime video I get

- Butch Bradley: From Las Vegas

- Melinda Hill: Inappropriate

- Steve Treviño: My Life In Quarantine

- Jimmy O. Yang: Good Deal

- Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist

- Michael Gelbart: All New Smash Hits

- Sebastian LIVE

- Tom Segura: Completely Normal

and so on.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#374

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it.

Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#375

Post by crateless »

On the other hand, theres YT which has remained pretty much the same UI-wise for as long as I can remember. And it is terrible.

I cannot search for videos about python that are longer than 1 hr. That is my pet peeve and regularly drives me up the wall. I have wanted this for years.

In addition to that, my feed is static. It's like I'm being told, "hey you, we know that you will like these and I won't show you aught else until you watch them first". Aarrrghhh.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#376

Post by rexreed »

I've been saying this since 2016. This is especially the case with Google apps, which across the board are decaying in usability and functionality. When I said that a few years ago, I was scorned. I think everyone is slowly coming to the same realization now.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#377

Post by mark-r »

sflicht wrote: post #343
smichel17 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The more settings you have, the more settings you won't care about. It's easy to get settings fatigue. And every setting you introduce adds complexity to both the code and the testing.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#378

Post by mark-r »

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…

I've found that the best programs are the ones under the control of a single benevolent dictator. They can maintain their focus and consistency much better than any other structure.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#379

Post by smichel17 »

sflicht wrote: post #343
smichel17 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I was using OSMAnd the other day. Wanted to change a setting that I knew exists, since I looked through them all at one point (don't remember which one off hand, sorry). Spent 2 or 3 minutes looking for it before I ran out of time and gave up. Not the first time this has happened (second or third, I think).

On the developer side, too many interrelated settings can increase the complexity of the code, making it less maintainable.

My favorite compromise is to use settings for the most common functionality tweaks, and then add script hooks to allow extensive customization of behavior. The Android app Simpletask[1] does a great job of this, imo. (There are many places where it could use polish, but it nails the overall approach).

[1]: https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#380

Post by benrapscallion »

mastazi wrote: post #366
benrapscallion wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NewsBlur can do this for YouTube videos.

Right! I was curious about how they do it and found out that Youtube actually has RSS feeds! At least according to this and a few other pages I've found https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel/ Also, I can see that for other services like Twitter, there are indeed third party providers that can create feeds https://rss.app/blog/how-to-create-twitter-rss-feeds Also Reddit subreddits and users: https:/…

For reddit, you can also look at inline-reddit.com NewsBlur and a couple other RSS feed readers have built-in Twitter clients. You can also use rss bridge to get Instagram in your RSS feeds.
Post reply on HN