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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#601

Post by manigandham »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #575
manigandham wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is unsolved? What's the revolutionary change since Winamp or Itunes in 2003?

I love and still use WinAmp and do not use any streaming -- but what changed is how people listen, thanks to iTunes and iPods etc and then Spotify. Everything is based on playlists and artist selection leaning away from albums/releases. It changed how people load up music, introduced a huge rise in 'random' playing that was way different than previous era of CDs where you'd pick an album and play it, or listen to rad…

The UI is still the same though. A big grid of Song - Artist - Album. Everything is fundamentally based on that, whether that's your entire library, a playlist, or filtered by something else.

Everything else is an addition, but somehow modern apps have managed to make the basic grid worse too at the same time.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#602

Post by jessikat »

craftinator wrote: post #486
jessikat wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps I don't understand the UX developer role enough, but I would imagine it involves research and user engagement. Perhaps the role is then too narrowly defined? I liked the comment about Word's competitor being the previous version, so that changing the UI/UX would need to provide tangible user benefits. I think Microsoft lacks some of that these days (early Windows 11 builds have been proof of that failing in my experience thus far).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#603

Post by julik »

grishka wrote: post #340
leppr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your unprovoked comment about not having a job read like you were desiring one.

I am indeed desiring one, but I'm too picky. And it's not for the money, but rather mostly for socialization (I'm lonely af). Maybe I'd work at a startup, but there aren't many of those that would want an open-source app, and there are even fewer that do something legitimately useful instead of inventing a problem and then heroically solving it. I worked at VKontakte (Russian social network) and was the only Android…

There is a place where "a visionary founder with technical ability and clear view of the UI they want" no longer aligns with what we can provide. It can turn into a soul-destroying farce just like a "growing company admits as many middle-managers as there are designers/engineers" simply because The Visionary woke up one day and decided that "this UI we have is shit". Combine it with the Russian approach to "find the closest person responsible and punish them the hardest way possible" and you get the setup you have described.

Be very careful when putting your trust in visionaries.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#604

Post by WJW »

godelski wrote: post #254
fendy3002 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time it's for inner achievements for the product manager or designers part. Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views. It can also redesigned to match style updates, useful for fashion, travel or wedding sites. Sometimes the menu increases that a list of buttons can't accommodate anymore so it's changed to it's own page or drop-down. Sometimes they want people to be conf…

Most of these sound pretty insane tbh (though some completely sane). > Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views. This one specifically irritates me. Even under the assumption that that new lead is correct and the new interface is cleaner and more usable, it still needs to be weighed against the time it takes to retrain users to the new format. You have to deal with what you were gi…

The benefits for the new UI lead are that they don't lose their job due to "having no vision" or something like that. Human psychology is just super bad at recognizing when "no action" has saved the day so to make any progress in a corporate setting you need to have visible achievements.

Giving such downsides to not changing the UI, no cost is too high for a new UI lead.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#605

Post by WJW »

stingraycharles wrote: post #444
danjac wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not something that's confined to design/UX though. Bring in a new CTO/tech lead and they'll tell you the current architecture is outdated or the code is spaghetti and needs a rewrite in [insert architecture/language doing the rounds on HN]. Bring in a new project manager and they'll want to introduce [insert Agile framework du jour]. Someone has been hired for presumably a lot of money, and if they just go "meh,…

Of course, but the difference is that there’s a much higher impact for the users if the design keeps changing. Technical infrastructure is pretty much entirely hidden from the users.

Sure, but it's not the users being fired if they "make no impact".

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#606

Post by lytefm »

Zababa wrote: post #580
indymike wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mobile developers and front-end developers increasingly don't want to work on technologies that are perceived as outdated, or even to work on someone else's code. Everyone wants to list new technologies and greenfield projects on their resumes. Resume driven development is a bad anti-pattern and leads to software nightmares. Avoid it. > Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look…

> It's all putting good for yourself over good for your customer and good for your employer. Wouldn't this not happen if the employers just paid more? From what I understand, people do resume-driven development because they want to work at a place that will pay more at some point.

Fair point. There was a discussion about an article asking why companies don't pay their Developers more to stay recently [1].

If I was maintaining some decades-old legacy code and knew that my employer will most likely still be around and pay me a competitive salary for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind just mastering COBOL.

But most companies go bust or lay off developers at some point, so keeping yourself employable by working with the latest tech stack is unfortunately quite a necessity.

[1] https://marker.medium.com/why-dont-tech-companies-pay-their-...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#607

Post by julik »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #204
chunkyks wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To counter your point, it's not just that product managers are easy to blame; it's that it's literally their job to change stuff. Developers want to change stuff and do greenfield because it's fun, but that's a whole different beast to a career track whose job it is to change things. This goes beyond just poor incentives ["Googler gets a raise because shiny new thing"], into "upper management have created a construct…

> To counter your point, it's not just that product managers are easy to blame; it's that it's literally their job to change stuff. Sure, but companies aren't being blindsided by project managers who sneak into their org charts and start driving change unbeknownst to company leadership. They're hired to do these things and their performance is based on how well they do them, just like anyone else. This might be a goo…

In some games the right moral choice is not to play them.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#608

Post by grishka »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #594
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Developers don't talk about enabling people or making lives better anymore, they don't talk about helping people work more efficiently or use their computer more effectively. Developers treat their users like cattle now. They addict them and herd them and farm their eyeballs for ad-revenue. They don't program to make the world a better place, they program because it's a fun way…

I'm sick of this bullshit. I always push back against managers or leads who're trying to get in a feature that users won't like, or will find confusing. And I'm not the only one. Not every programmer works for the surveillance-industrial complex.

That's what I did at VK too. At some point though my opinion just stopped being respected because by then developers were demoted to mere translators from human to computer language.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#609

Post by JadeNB »

Solstafir wrote: post #406
grishka wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

In my experience, I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) or the the backend starts to crumble with the weight of new ad-hoc features, increased number of users etc. With agile, practically, many times development is just in time with little regard to long term requirements or the evolution of software so it's a…

> I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry)

Stale UI is very different from not being feature complete. vim and emacs are very stale UIs, but also as close to feature complete as I need, and thank God no-one feels the need to update them for modern UI preferences (or, rather, that those who do feel that need can do it without taking away my experience of classic vim).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#610

Post by JadeNB »

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…

Foobar2000 is still around! http://mobile.foobar2000.com/
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