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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#181

Post by ec109685 »

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…

The only way to combat this mentality is that developers and product managers need to feel more ownership of the long term success of their projects. When your compensation is roughly similar no matter how successful your work is, you're going to optimize for yourself over that of the best interest of the company.

What is it in it for the developers to work on Object-C and other older technologies?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#182

Post by the_duke »

zozbot234 wrote: post #71
dmitriid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS doesn't have money for good design, because good design costs money and commitment. Both are the things OSS projects struggle with.

OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop. And it's becoming quite competitive in mobile and touch interfaces, too.

Which apps are you referring to?

I couldn't name a single open source desktop apps which has good UX or design.

It's natural, since these are built by developers, not designers, and they primarily care about functionality and don't have to entice users with good looks and UX.

I do know some Android apps that are pretty good, eg RedReader for Reddit.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#183

Post by TeMPOraL »

simonw wrote: post #123
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…

The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note. Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later" I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my no…

This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line that so many companies, including Google, try to push down our throats.

Searching is only better than organizing if searches are exhaustive, and I can trust that they are exhaustive. My experience with variety of products, including Evernote, Google Drive and GMail, tells me I can't trust that. I had plenty of instances when I searched for a thing I knew I have stored, and search returned nothing.

It's because of this why organizing is still better than searching - if you're able to sort your stuff into some hierarchy ("groups", "folders") and then be able to browse that hierarchy, you can do a fully exhaustive check manually, by just going over everything.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#184

Post by orhmeh09 »

upcode wrote: post #125
wodenokoto wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for such an insightful comment

It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#185

Post by maficious »

grishka wrote: post #144
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'…

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.

Exactly, but banks aren't a good example.

Some people here mention feature plateaus and completeness of the app. Obvious question is, what should the employer then do? The software is complete, from now on there's only maintenance, which is relatively less work compared to building from scratch, so as a consequence I guess developers should be paid less then? Or like you said, fired?

Obviously the manpower could be just moved to the next project, but what if we look at the worst case scenario? What comes next?

Are there at all such mechanisms that could allow for, say, a team of engineers that maintains a bunch of projects in different companies. If such a team would take a maintenance of a few complete programs, the count of them would make up the difference in pay, e.g. a few mainted apps for a lower pay equal pay for building one app from scratch.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#186

Post by mikelward »

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 the clock moved to balance out icons on either side of the big center notch.

Then next year they moved to a left-side holepunch notch, but didn't move it back. Or even offer the option. :(

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#187

Post by Ecstatify »

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…

My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#188

Post by orangegreen »

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

This is the TED Talk you're talking about.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#189

Post by dghlsakjg »

wayneftw wrote: post #97
donatzsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That it's an Electron app, mostly.

That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same exact experience on every platform... including when you embed it's components within a web app which is very useful.

I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you.

I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines.

Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#190

Post by mastazi »

In my opinion it's not just a PM who wants to get promoted, in many cases it's also misaligned interests of consumers and app makers. In the Economist example, the consumer might just want to resume that article they couldn't finish and later be done with it, but the app makers might want to "maximize engagement" by showing you all those daily news every single time you open the app.
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