Remember Skype? At some point it was the default messenger of most people I know. Then it progressively got worse after being bought by Microsoft, and culminated in a "redesign" which among thousands of bugs also added Snapchat-like stories and other useless shit, and was so terrible that I plain refused to ever use it again, and most of my friends did as well.
Apps Getting Worse
501–510 of 635 posts
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.
I listened to 3 minutes of Joe Roegan out of boredom and now Joe roegan lives perpetually on the Spotify homescreen
Oh man. I discover an album I really love, and next time it takes such effort to find my way back to it. But that silly, boring podcast I listened to for a few minutes last year? It's the first thing I see when I open the app.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#503> 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…
From where I sit as a dev, it's less "I want shiny new tech on my resume" and more "we need to refactor / simplify everything for ease of maintainability". It's a hard problem. Sometimes it's unnecessary but sometimes the tech debt is real. It's not uncommon to have one blessed path for doing most things but hey, here's this edge case that doesn't fit our mental model and is a pain to test and bloats our bundle and w…
It's much worse in ecosystems that are changing the core frameworks at a rapid pace (hi, React!). If you don't do the same thing Facebook does internally, and continually refactor your entire codebase onto the latest paradigms, you quickly end up unable to adopt new features and 3rd party libraries when you actually need to do so.
If you look instead at a mature ecosystem, like, say, C++ or Java, you might reasonably maintain a codebase for a decade without needing to adopt new language features.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#504I 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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y This is the TED Talk you're talking about.
THANKS! Yes this is the one!
(The incorrect Barry Schwartz one I posted is excellent too though!)
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#505> 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…
Resume driven development strikes again! Everyone just wants to use the latest shiny thing then switch jobs and leave the pile of burning mess to the next sucker. Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.
> Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.
But YNAB is also a great example of apps-getting-worse — you're explicitly praising the 2012 version over the 2015/evergreen version.
(In YNAB's case, they had business reasons to make the app worse (or thought they did), but I bet that's true of many of the examples in TFA)
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#506Earlier 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…
Having worked in the mobile space for the last decade, it is my experience that these UI/X changes usually are a side effect of new management (after a purge) or from way on high (the c-suite).
Neither one of these groups know much about UI/X but hold strong personal opinions which they automatically believe must hold true for all users.
I am currently in a tug of war over such UI/X change for a feature in a banking application, making the case that we have plenty of older users who will have massive issues with the current redesign.
My suggestions on performing user testing on the new design to validate them has not received much support over the last weeks.
And so, I have started looking around for other opportunities on the market (this is also why places with bad UI/X continue doing so, they select for the people who are ok with making it).
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
" I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time." Most people probably blame themself of not getting it. Or throw hands in the air of what to do about it. And most don't know that you can make software that fits to the user needs and not the other way around. OpenSource could have potential here, but most free software developers are not really into UX design either and seem to…
If your users don't have another option, or your product has serious network effects, users will keep coming back. From Fast Company 2016: "To test its users’ loyalty, Facebook sometimes made its Android app crash for several hours over the course of several years. ... Users were so hooked that they “never stopped coming back,” despite the errors." https://fastcompany.com/3055089 (2016)
It is always fascinating how little respect FB has for its users, yet they stay.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#508Earlier 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…
> metrics-based comparison from telemetry (we raised metric X by changing the design)
Sounds like a conclusion drawn from a correlation to me.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#509I just dislike the whole “there’s an app for that” mindset. Adding an app is not a linear increase in complexity, it’s quadratic: you now need to somehow make it play well with everything you already do. I don’t want more apps, I want better apps that support more workflows in more transparent ways.
Admittedly, I don’t use a personal general-purpose computer for as many things as I used to (managing an mp3 collection is no longer a thing; movies are on a smart tv; messengers are on a phone; …), but these days I try to avoid new stuff, even where it’s a bit clunky to do things in the GUI programs I already use. Which are basically xterm, Emacs, Firefox, and Darktable like once a month.
Phones are a lost cause.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#510Earlier 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…
Having worked in the mobile space for the last decade, it is my experience that these UI/X changes usually are a side effect of new management (after a purge) or from way on high (the c-suite). Neither one of these groups know much about UI/X but hold strong personal opinions which they automatically believe must hold true for all users. I am currently in a tug of war over such UI/X change for a feature in a banking…
My pet theory is that Spotify doesn't want you to choose your own music but steer you towards specific songs instead. Either to increase your level or length of engagement with the service, or because some songs earn them more cash than others.