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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#301

Post by andrewfong »

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…

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 we keep getting paged for it and the engineers who built it left the company and didn't leave any documentation or tests, so let's just kill that feature.

And now users are pissed and don't understand, because from their perspective, they think the cost of leaving the feature alone is zero. But the truth is the cost of keeping it is quite high and there just isn't enough usage to justify engineering effort to reduce ongoing maintenance costs.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#302

Post by lucb1e »

sushisource wrote: post #104
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…

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'…

This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them). After half a year of waiting for them to patch this worst of bugs I've given up and moved away. But yeah not everyone is going to remember using a different and open source podcast app years ago and can easily move back, most people will just stick with it. GDPR's automatic data transfer clause could really be put to better use.

For music I can't simply install an open source alternative. That I make a backup of the apk before hitting update says enough I think.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#303

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

And it is ridiculous that it doesn't happen in software, because software is one of the most mailable things on the planet. In the 90s you could make your desktop look like a hot dog stand with a few mouse clicks. Or, you know, choose more tasteful colors and fonts. Nowadays we need bespoke "dark modes" just to have 2 choices. Our industry is pathetic.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#304

Post by tucosan »

ddon wrote: post #96
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…

Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.

Once you start using Joplin for a longer period, you start noticing bad UX issues.

Encrypted sync is causing many people issues with multiple keys being generated after adding a mobile sync target. There is no easy way to remove superfluous keys from Joplin, once they have been created and synced across clients.

The cli UX is weird and doesn't follow Unix best practices. The main developer made some weird design choices and some important features haven't been implemented for years now.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#305

Post by SilverRed »

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.

Spotify has a lot to work on. Integrations with new devices is a big one. They recently added support for streaming songs directly on the Apple Watch but are still yet to support saving them locally to play offline if you don't have your phone. New required features like this are constantly popping up. As well as other infinitely big tasks like optimizing all of their server side software to support and ever increasing user base.

They could also work forever on making suggestions better. As well as new features like lossless audio coming up soon. Supporting new iOS and android versions/features. There is never a point where a piece of software is simply done because the OS changes how things work constantly.

The companies that just contract out for a tiny bit of work every few months end up with garbage software because no one really knows or understands the code so they just tack on bad patches until the system eventually crumbles. And every bank I have used does have a full time development team. The one I currently use sends out monthly emails for the new features they have released and has a road map showing what they are planning on adding.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#306

Post by emodendroket »

lucb1e wrote: post #302
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'…

This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them)…

There are quite a few alternative music services. Not sure what you mean by that.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#307

Post by emodendroket »

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.

Even if we just accepted your premise and ignored the fact that people are put off by old-looking apps, eventually something like iOS updates is going to break one of the apps. And in reality they add features regularly too.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#308

Post by thethethethe »

sushisource wrote: post #104
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…

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'…

> It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose

This makes sense in the short term but what happens when UI design passes you by and all your competitors look sleek and modern while your UI looks clunky in comparison? Would you use Spotify if it's UI looked straight out of the 2002? Maybe you would, but most people will not.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#309

Post by SilverRed »

randomdata wrote: post #173
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, bank software (customer facing) could use a development team.

I recently switched to a new bank which is basically an offshoot of an existing one where they handle all of the development, and the parent company manages the legal/banking part.

It's a really awesome setup really because they are constantly adding new and fun features, experimenting with what works best. Stuff like automatically rounding up every transaction and sending the remainder to your savings.

The ability to instantly create and delete savings "accounts" without having to register a real account number on the phone. My favorite feature is what they call 2up where you send an invite to another member of the bank and you instantly get a shared account where you can both add and withdraw money. It also adds a second card to your phone wallet which draws from the shared account. So much less work and risk than traditional shared accounts.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#310

Post by treelovinhippie »

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…

Get drunk/high and try to use their desktop app. The primary button to create a new note looks like a "new note" button. You'd expect that when you click it a new note will be created. Nope. It's a dropdown. You then need to click "note" in the dropdown.

How they managed to fuck up the UX on that core button is insane. Two clicks to create a new note. Why? Just why?

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