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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#481

Post by sprkwd »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #428
tomoko wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener,…

And so many free podcast apps have been around for over a decade, demonstrating that there are many simple ways to play podcasts right. But I guess they can't get basic music navigation and library curation right either, and that seemed to work pretty well in 2005.

Remember kids, RSS is still a thing!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#482

Post by holoduke »

In a way I am happy about this. I am running a small business and for about 10 years I am the underdog of a certain app category. I maintain the app with just a few people. And despite the fact we cannot compete with the bigger players on certain things like data quality, size, comprehensiveness etc. We actually have a very straight to the point UI and no overly intrusive advertisement or other customer pay now tricks. We do not collect or use any data. Nothing. Zero. And yet we have millions of active users per day.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#483

Post by jatins »

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…

Don't hate the player, hate the game. In every company, the incentives are such that you need to change stuff to get promoted.

Despite hating the game, I'd probably create similar incentives if I had a company. Because the other option is stagnation.

Is there a third option?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#484

Post by jessikat »

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…

Not only that, in the past, your Artists and Albums page would show all artists/albums in your "liked" list, even if it was one or two tracks. Used to be able to play all the songs you did like, but now it only shows whole albums liked, or whole artists liked. Those two pages are entirely neutered, and I have zero use for them now, and find it really difficult to browse for a random artist to listen to, of just their stuff I like. Their UX gets worse every update. I miss the era of non-updating apps. Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#485

Post by foota »

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…

shrug I like the spotify UI. I think the issue is that people are trying to use it as a catalog, which it isn't.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#486

Post by craftinator »

jessikat wrote: post #484
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…

Not only that, in the past, your Artists and Albums page would show all artists/albums in your "liked" list, even if it was one or two tracks. Used to be able to play all the songs you did like, but now it only shows whole albums liked, or whole artists liked. Those two pages are entirely neutered, and I have zero use for them now, and find it really difficult to browse for a random artist to listen to, of just their…

> Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?

I generally assign the problem of "change for the sake of change" to the UX developers, at least at any significantly large company. Once a company gets large enough, you're employment is no longer justified by the quality of your work. You justify it by shipping product features, enhancements, and fixes. So UX developers can't sit back and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#487

Post by npteljes »

It's not like proprietary software is made to make the users' life better. It's made to make money. They need to appease the users somewhat, but it's far from the top priority; in fact, often it's the opposite. They cram in as much profitable abuse as they can away with - see for example Netflix's or booking.com's UX, chock-full of dark patterns.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#488

Post by lordnacho »

rutierut wrote: post #471

One ridiculous example is Revolut. I'm nut sure but I think they change their UX/UI about once a month, it's so extremely frustrated that a banking app, which is just a tool, not for entertainment, has to be figured out again and again because they keep changing it. Without adding anything. The UX never improves, just changes...

I was going to say just this.

Where are my recent transactions? How do I change the currency? Where are my account details? How do I pay someone?

All these things worked and were clear at some point in the past.

Now you can still do them but first you have to click the wrong things a few times first before you find it.

Purely UI though, the actual sending of money still seems to work.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#489

Post by lvxferre »

My grandma had a story about the devil's son's eye. The boy had such pretty eyes, that the devil couldn't help but caress constantly, while saying "my son got such good eyes!". Until, one day, the devil pierces one of them. By accident, while fondling it.

I think that story illustrates why software gets worse: it's less about the company caring too little about it, and more about caring too much. It sees its software becoming popular, liked, and the people in that company (I don't think it's just the PM, but everyone) feel the urge to "do" something. Make it better, bigger, more functional, oh look we should add the kitchen sink too, but not we need to rip apart the old floor because it is not waterproof, "it'll be fine".

>Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.

Or maybe software companies should ask more input from users before, when, and after they make changes on how the software works. Bad software changes can be rolled back, unlike the devil's son's eye.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#490

Post by bosie »

godelski wrote: post #334
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…

> 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…

The problem with your approach though is that there is no such thing as 'a user'. There are so many different cohorts of users. In your testing workflow it seems you are only using hardcore users for it. People obsessed with your software (internal or beta users) before pushing it out to the masses.

How do you avoid leaving the other cohorts behind?

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