Twitter was a great example for me. I used it early and then stopped until recently. Once I started again there was an overwhelming amount of ads and random suggestions. Terrible.
Apps Getting Worse
351–360 of 635 posts
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#352The 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…
May be the fundamental problem is that since the app _can_ change every time its boots (it being electron based shell with dynamic loading of JS & all), the UX team gets compelled to tweak, experiment, iterate when there is no particular need.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.
It happens to be the case that software maintenance requires essentially the same skills as software implementation, so we don’t differentiate between the two jobs. And besides that, the nature of what people demand is different: nobody expects a single-family home to suddenly accommodate 50 families, but the equivalent of this is not exactly rare in the world of software.
You forgot that maintenance contractors aren’t kept on permanent retainer. Why bother keeping software maintenance crews on permanently?
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#354Earlier 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.
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 j…
I huge non-tech company, manufacturing company. Our software that is perfectly stable and have no new business requirements fall in this bucket.
There's 2 scenarios 1) The entire dev team truly does move on...and the operations are in charge of the production app (they're in charge, anyways). There's no code changes...just OS, database security patching etc. If there are any code changes for security (i.e. upgrading Struts because Equifax got hacked...) then the business side that owns the app gets some resources. But otherwise it really isn't touched. It does cause some contention because no dev wants to be pulled in to work on those junk. But in the last few years, we have teams who's only job is to work on this kind of stuff. They work on apps that only need a dev team for a few months.
2) A stable app is part of a team. The team doesn't work on it anymore...For example my team previously owned ~8 systems. I think like 6 were mature where it had no new features. A lot of people actually left to other teams because of that - which is an issue in itself. What good dev would hang around? And when a new app or major feature is needed...you're left with stranglers and junior engineers who need to somehow step up.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#355The 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'…
> I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time.
Similarly with the Google Play to Youtube Music transition. Play was so clean, snappy, and intuitive. Youtube Music is similar to what you describe of Spotify where everything is buried, busy layout, and nothing is intuitive.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is right on the money. Everyone wants to do new and interesting work on a product, which naturally means changing things even if it isn't really an improvement. No one is going to put "maintained system that wasn't broken" on their resume. One thing that has likely exacerbated this issue in recent years is "data-driven" product design. While I'm fanatical about evidence-based decision making, so many of these pr…
Engagement metrics apply well beyond ad companies. Basically any product used by many users interacting with a UI is eligible.
But applications are tools to do a job. When I use a hammer I hit a nail, job done. Hammer can be laid down.
I don't need my hammer to be frustrating to use, a nail-hitting-service subscription model, have social chat options... etc. You get the idea.
Like the idea of a good butler, the best tool is one that removes a concern for the user, and doesn't take any more attention after that.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their…
I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all. I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.
I've found their changes quite nice, however that's because I mostly use the app for podcasts.
Maybe they are pivoting?
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does Syncthing count?
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#359> 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…
> 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 good on their resume going into the next job.
Greenfield = easy. Fixing a 10 year old architectural mistake = hard.
> Blaming product managers is an easy out
Resume driven development and product managers who make changes for the sake of their own resume are two sides of the same coin. It's all putting good for yourself over good for your customer and good for your employer.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the most critical to everyday user experience. The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security. Nor is…
In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)
Windows 10 is not a peak in any sense. It's a continuation of the downward trend that Windows 8 started.
It's the version of Windows that normalized ads in the OS, unreasonable amounts of telemetry and horrible flat UI.