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

461–470 of 635 posts

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#461

Post by Griffinsauce »

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…

There is one simple reason that enables all the shit mentioned in other replies: as much as we like to pretend, the impact of design is very hard to measure.

A product experience is nuanced, part of a journey, with learning curves, preferences and problems. Much of this is completely ignored in the measurement of the success of design changes.

There are lots of reasons people tend to screw with things that are fine, but the root cause is that they get away with it. Hell, they even get rewarded for it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#462

Post by TuringNYC »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #234
grishka wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And they somehow existed even before computers were invented. Computers sure did help streamline the processes tho.

Sure did. Did. As in already done. What else, aside from security fixes, needs to change software-wise? Edit: I realize this can be read with a pile of snark that I didn’t intend. Apologies.

Modern payment support; Keeping up with regulatory changes; Keeping up with regulatory report of the year; Updating risk systems to account for modern mortgage risks; Expanding integrations to other countries; Keeping up with OS changes for existing apps; Responding on court data requests

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#463

Post by harry8 »

ganafagol wrote: post #454

Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet. About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community wo…

Opposite point of view to yours here (yours is equally valid). I vastly prefer Gnome 3. Less rolly thing required.

Separate to that it's not such a great example here even if you hate the change as it's a major version. Gnome 2 didn't change much where you find things and how it works for many years. Gnome 3 has been going on in a similar vein of not having changed much from a UI perspective (at least that I've noticed) for what, 8 years or so? I don't even recall the last time I had to learn something new about using it. You're completely within your rights to dislike it. There's mate and xfce for you that might be more to your taste. And as an aside, isn't just seriously cool that we have good options and alternatives if we don't like the way something goes on the linux desktop? When Apple/MS change you go with them or dump everything you use and how you use it to shift to a competitor. Gnome to xfce is pretty straightforward and you use it to use all the same software applications.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#464

Post by harry8 »

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…

Those who purchase JIRA don't use it. Those who are stuck using don't make the purchasing decision. That lock in against your will really fuels that fire of hate.

Atlassian are the current, unchallenged, world beating champions of S L O W and have been for a long time. But the purchasers don't care they don't have to use the crud.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#465

Post by dmitriid »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #386
godelski wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like a lot of settings but I'm also okay with them being buried a bit. Advanced users tend to not care about going 5 layers deep to get what they want.

Exactly. They can be buried, and in many cases should be, but they still need to be there somewhere. Spotify seems to lose one or two useful features per calendar quarter. They're not hidden, but lost altogether. If you really want your blood pressure pumped up, try the Spotify mobile app under CarPlay sometime. At this point, it lets you do basically nothing . A 1980s-era cassette deck gave you more control over the…

For CarPly they are very limited in what they can allow you to do relatively safely.

So it's basically radio+cassette player

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#466

Post by starky »

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…

Yup, a company doesn't want to develop more products than it needs to, so they instead try to stuff all the market needs into a singular product, which results in a compromised product for every customer. I'm constantly complaining to my product management at work about this fact, it isn't that they don't know it, it is just that company management would never approve the resources for the 2-4 products that actually need to get made.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#467

Post by akho »

wodenokoto wrote: post #122
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'…

> Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.

Last music player UI I liked was Muine circa 2007. I don’t think we are improving our solutions.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#468

Post by franga2000 »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #461
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…

There is one simple reason that enables all the shit mentioned in other replies: as much as we like to pretend, the impact of design is very hard to measure. A product experience is nuanced, part of a journey, with learning curves, preferences and problems. Much of this is completely ignored in the measurement of the success of design changes. There are lots of reasons people tend to screw with things that are fine,…

This seems like a solved problem as well. Don't people use focus groups anymore? Or have an open feedback forum where people can submit feedback and use user ratings to see which issues are the most important to the most users.

Many companies already do have forums like this and they're filled with UI complaints having sometimes thousands of upvotes, but it's all for nothing because almost none of them actually use that feedback.

My bet is still on "UI design isn't a full-time job, it's project work, so UI designers have to keep moving things around to stay relevant in one company". As much as I don't like outsourcing, having a bunch of designers on your payroll with nothing to do most days but still needing to pass all the employee rating crap is bound to result in an unstable and never good enough UI.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#470

Post by go_elmo »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The 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…

Switched to yt music and it is great and not annoying as spotify. Also, there is vanced, for the immoral ;)
Post reply on HN