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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#531

Post by drw85 »

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…

They actually removed all the features that i used all the time.

You can't shuffle all songs in your library anymore, since they removed the songs tab completely. There used to be a workaround with a playlist of all your liked songs (which turned into all songs in your library). That was killed too, so now the only way is by using a playlist and managing it manually. Playlists are limited to 10k songs though...

Generally they seem to remove features in every second update and i'll move on to another service after my current sub runs out in 3 months.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#532

Post by zwaps »

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…

Do people remember music players like Fb2000, MusicMonkey, Winamp etc?

In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement.

Now spotify makes drag&drop like ~somewhat~ work, but you still can't sort your music and at least the 1/4ths of the screen permanently shows an empty "connect with facebook to have 'friends'" sidebar, that can not be minimized.

It's funny to me how the invention of these JavaScript apps has thrown computing back by a good decade. If you look at how careful Win9X was designed and researched, and how careless 100% of the current UIX is designed (mostly blindly A/B testing I guess), it is such a contrast.

Are there any UIX designers or frontend devs here on HN? How do you deal with essentially being representatives of the dark ages of your profession? Are you embarrassed, or do you yourself think that your "craft" doesn't really matter for the bottom line? Or has design already been replaced by AI/ML anyway, and we are all yelling at windmills here?

I really wonder how you release something like Spotify et. al. as, say, a lead designer or lead frontend developer, lean back in your chair and go: "Yeah, I did a good job here".

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#534

Post by ekimekim »

mastazi wrote: post #205

There should be a new category of apps, where you can still get the contents offered by a given service (Spotify, Youtube, your favourite news service etc.) while at the same time not using the built in UI. For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that will show you every new video published by channels you choose. No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be interested in". You could d…

The problem is that these apps come with a built-in doomsday. If they ever get popular enough to be meaningfully on the radar of the company whose app they're replacing, they'll be attacked both legally ("you're violating our TOS by using this app") and technically (removing API access or obfuscating internal APIs / pages to prevent scraping).

Efforts like youtube-dl are a constant arms race between google making changes that prevent it working, and the youtube-dl devs pushing fixes. It's a piece of software where "too old to be useful" is measured in months as tons of things don't work anymore.

These companies will never willingly give up control over the user experience (especially if they NEED that control in order to serve ads), and they'll use every method at their disposal in order to do so. Discord already threatens to ban anyone who tries to use a third party client - how long until twitter does the same?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#535

Post by rogual »

zwaps wrote: post #532
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…

Do people remember music players like Fb2000, MusicMonkey, Winamp etc? In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement. Now spotify makes drag&dro…

Different definitions of "good job" I expect. Making something useful / effortless / fast / a joy to use etc. vs making something that boosts your key performance metrics.

Having the friends sidebar always there probably increases engagement with Spotify's social growth strategy which boosts network effects and drives recurring revenue or something. It's all stuff you can plot on graphs and show that you're being effective.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#536

Post by gempir »

zwaps wrote: post #532
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…

Do people remember music players like Fb2000, MusicMonkey, Winamp etc? In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement. Now spotify makes drag&dro…

At least the social bar can be removed in the settings if I recall correctly.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#537

Post by drw85 »

egypturnash wrote: post #47

Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a few things. Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty but gets in the way of the core function of “taking out your phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes”. I co…

I was actually shocked that a note taking app is running 15 processes in the background at all times.

Wunderlist had the same problem. A todo list app that runs 10+ processes when it's not even open? WTF?

I noticed the same about discord, slack and basically all modern apps. Why do these basic things need to run so many processes in the background? They are completely over-engineered and sluggish and slow.

At this point i only use the web versions of most software when i need them, so they don't clog up my system with useless processes.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#538

Post by bajsejohannes »

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…

It's also incredibly slow. On my M1 Macbook, touted as one of the fastest laptops ever, it takes 3 seconds from opening it until there's anything on the screen, and than about 5 seconds more until it's interactive.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#540

Post by gampleman »

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…

I think this goes to the fact that the people designing, implementing and signing off on development are looking at the UIs constantly - close to 8 hours a day, every day.

This is usually (at least) an order of magnitude more than your users (well unless you're Facebook I guess). I think many people just get bored looking at the same old screen all the time; and so when a designer inevitably proposes something different everyone on the team thinks it looks great and so much better than the old design.

It's hard for them to realise that it's not better, but merely alleviates the boredom they feel.

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