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 playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All" next to that to find it.
I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!
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'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. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.
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 hintings that people have been relied on.
So, the big question is: why? Good design is hard and often underappreciated. I don't want to convey that idea. But why do things like this happen so often? Changes that don't actually provide any more utility. Changes that remove utility. It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it. Often backend people say that it is just done to justify their existence but I don't buy this because there are plenty of good design features that can be constantly worked on and improved. Is there some psychological effect this has on users because it is once again novel? So often we don't see good design improvements but things that just come off as "change because change." Why? Help me understand.
I do wonder if to some extent the inherently subjective nature of UX/UI design is what keeps it forever going? Designers want to stay employed and not just become a "bring in one-time at the start" contractor, so they justify changes through continual enhancement or similar, assuming the current solution may be one of a few local optima rather than the global optimum.
Lacking objective numerical comparison, perhaps designers and product teams attempt to do metrics-based comparison from telemetry (we raised metric X by changing the design). That leads to an ever changing design that tries to optimise for business objectives, rather than what the user wants.
Backend code can be optimised and honed and improved with objective measurements (CPU cycles used, latency, perceived performance, download time for user), but design doesn't give these.
In saying that though, rewrites in new languages and frameworks do seem to be becoming the problem for backend - optimisation isn't seem as exciting or career advancing, I guess... Few are optimising code for performance these days though, I'd wager - everyone just assumes your user won't mind your software using 15% of their CPU when sitting idle.
Maybe it is just as simple as that metrics individuals are measured on for job performance?
Well, take a look at fashion design. Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. But designs for clothing always keeps changing, even if they are small, subtle changes.
I think you can apply the same towards design of anything. Tastes change. While a certain design philosophy might be a godsend in 2010, it might be considered trash in 2015.
To be fair, I also think a lot of design decisions are poorly made, and a lot of businesses make poor user experiences.
I like the idea of doubling-down on UX patterns as a 'fashion' that we all have to adapt to each occasion and season.
We'd quickly branch into 'busines formal' UX patterns that change infrequently, only splashing a company color in places but largely uniform, all the way through to 'haute couture' UX patterns like the recent 'brutalist' trend, trusting they only appear on trendier sites and dropshipping fronts.
> Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world.
Objectivity is an ideal we can strive towards. And several crazy and expensive designs are worn in the real world. I have seen it with my own eyes. The people who are able to afford those clothes either:
- Have bad taste (A subjective judgement which is logically wrong, since it is absolute)
Humans are never objective. Ever. Not only that, this inherent and fundamental subjectivity means they could never know what objectivity looks like in order to judge whether something is indeed objective. Because their criteria are subjective.
Yes, Kant named it: "Das Ding an sich" ie "The thing, in itself". We can never perceive it in its totality, since our senses always deceive us, thus: objectivity is impossible.
They do, but do they change as quickly as every season?...or sometimes people do those who make money off changing tastes tell you that tastes change that often?
Haute couture runway isn’t intended to be worn. It generally shows a concept of the general theme for the season as well as ability. It’s not the same as UI/UX whose entire purpose is to be used, that’s more like the prêt-a-porter lines for fashion (which are also on runways)
Female jean pockets being small is entirely a driver for handbags and the like. It’s a poor decision for practicality but entirely a business decision — it’s sorta a dark design pattern I guess similar to how amazon buries privacy settings
There are objective measurements that can be done, but they’re difficult/expensive to do effectively.
Like, “How many interactions/seconds does it take our users to find X?”
It’s difficult because you have to know what “X” a user was looking for, which requires some varying degree of asking lots of users and reading those responses to be accurate.
Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and organizationally, even though it produces awful software.
> Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and organizationally, even though it produces awful software.
Engagement is such a terrible metric. I'm not saying it should be thrown out, but it is classic example of Goodhart's Law[0]. Rage is engagement. Too much reliance on engagement is what got social media into a race to the bottom. That's not the mark of a quality product.
Measuring is hard, you're right. But if you're going to use bad measurements (which often is our only choice) they shouldn't be targets. We should understand where they fail and use the information accounting for that, not ignoring it.
Not everything can be quantified but things should be at least qualitatively validated by the user base. Sometimes the problems are well know by anyone reading the app reviews and still aren't properly fixed.
I am the maintainer of Red Moon, a FLOSS screen filter app for Android. Over a period of several years, the location of the toggle has moved from a switch at the top, to a switch and a floating action button (FAB), back to just a switch, and will soon move to just a FAB.
I can provide more detail later if someone would like, but the short of it is:
1) As other features changed (permission prompts and moving the growing number of settings to their own screen), one location or the other made more sense.
2) I thought I would like the single top switch better than a single FAB, but after using it for a while, I think the switch feels more confusing than fresh (the action bar is a nonstandard location for a switch).
Overall, I would say it's because design is really hard. But not like that! It's hard because when you spend so much time close to a system, you start to overthink things, and then second-guess yourself. So you can't trust your intuition, you need to listen to users with fresh eyes. But they're also telling you 5 different, conflicting things, and if you listen to everyone you'll have a settings section 9 miles long. You can try to rely on data, but that's mostly good for reaching a local maximum, not staying cohesive. The best designers are able to keep their "fresh eyes" even after working with the system for a long time.
> I thought I would like the single top switch better than a single FAB, but after using it for a while, I think the switch feels more confusing than fresh (the action bar is a nonstandard location for a switch).
This seems to be addressed by one of my complaints. Was this feature not tested before pushed out to users?
I get that design is difficult. Anyone saying otherwise is biased. But it seems like a big problem is just trying something out first. Design can take months of use to realize something is bad. It seems like what should be done is: create new UI; use internally and push to everyone's version, use for a few weeks to a month; push to beta and get user feedback and pay attention to web traffic like HN and Reddit complaints about the new design; then decide if it should be pushed or not. I've seen apps that seem to follow this but just push despite bad user feedback and bad internal feedback. Going through the motions isn't enough, it has to be used as iterations.
> So you can't trust your intuition, you need to listen to users with fresh eyes. But they're also telling you 5 different, conflicting things, and if you listen to everyone you'll have a settings section 9 miles long.
A good piece of advice I heard was "listen to users for problems. Don't listen to users for solutions." Because people are actually really good at identifying problems. But most people are really terrible at solving problems (I mean if they were good at it we wouldn't have 90% of the problems we do). The addendum is to only take solution advice from experts that understand more of the nuance of what you're doing, but then to still be careful.
The problem with your approach though is that there is no such thing as 'a user'. There are so many different cohorts of users. In your testing workflow it seems you are only using hardcore users for it. People obsessed with your software (internal or beta users) before pushing it out to the masses.
How do you avoid leaving the other cohorts behind?
What is wrong with having a lot of settings? I absolutely hate that Twitter does not let me turn off their "features", but rather only lets me say "see less often" (which of course does nothing because I told Twitter not to track my preferences etc, but probably doesn't do anything for anyone anyway, except maybe provide a datapoint for some poorly thought out ML algorithm they put in place).
I was using OSMAnd the other day. Wanted to change a setting that I knew exists, since I looked through them all at one point (don't remember which one off hand, sorry). Spent 2 or 3 minutes looking for it before I ran out of time and gave up. Not the first time this has happened (second or third, I think).
On the developer side, too many interrelated settings can increase the complexity of the code, making it less maintainable.
My favorite compromise is to use settings for the most common functionality tweaks, and then add script hooks to allow extensive customization of behavior. The Android app Simpletask[1] does a great job of this, imo. (There are many places where it could use polish, but it nails the overall approach).
The more settings you have, the more settings you won't care about. It's easy to get settings fatigue. And every setting you introduce adds complexity to both the code and the testing.
Maybe this is a problem with a specific type of UI? Something like git feels like it has a million settings, yet they do not bother most people. When you need something, you can often search the manual and find out how to set it up.
I like a lot of settings but I'm also okay with them being buried a bit. Advanced users tend to not care about going 5 layers deep to get what they want.
Exactly. They can be buried, and in many cases should be, but they still need to be there somewhere. Spotify seems to lose one or two useful features per calendar quarter. They're not hidden, but lost altogether.
If you really want your blood pressure pumped up, try the Spotify mobile app under CarPlay sometime. At this point, it lets you do basically nothing. A 1980s-era cassette deck gave you more control over the listening experience, just because its fast-forward and rewind buttons worked.
I'm pretty sure they could implement the same transport controls that my cassette deck had in 1989. They could also enable additional features when the vehicle isn't moving, if they cared enough to do so.
What's not safe is providing an app that's so frustrating to use that it encourages the driver to touch and grope and scroll and drag all kinds of different things, looking for a commonplace UI affordance that, surely, has got to be there someplace, yet somehow isn't.
Or (worse) providing an app that frequently (but not always) fails to return to the same screen and playback state that was active when the engine was last shut off. That's the #1 unforgivable sin in any autosound system, and... yup... they somehow managed to pull it off.
It's as if the Spotify dev team is managed by B. F. Skinner himself, and they think we're all a bunch of lab rats.
Honestly every car app I've used is just terrible. VLC locks out half your artists (it does unlock when you're stopped). Maps blocks limits the keyboard and forces you to use voice.
I'm frequently disconnecting my phone, doing what I want, and then reconnecting it. This defeats the entire purpose of car play other than that my GPS is displayed in a place that is visible to me. I'm sure the play engineers have thought long and hard about how to prevent certain behaviors. But I am not confident they watched people use them in the real world. People are very good at finding ways around limitations. It's impossible to think your way through this without actually observing people. I'm not so sure it is Skinner and lab rats but "we're smart and thought about everything." I'm sure you're smart, but no one can think of everything. Thinking that makes you not smart.
Worse, there's no passenger mode for these apps and most of them don't lift restrictions when you're stopped. The lack of these features adds to people not stopping and just doing more dangerous things.
But I am not confident they watched people use them in the real world.
Oh, rest assured, they do. Time spent screwing around trying to get the app to do what you want is considered "engagement," and treated as a target for optimization.
Honestly the controls are so limited that it makes me end up picking up my phone, disconnecting it, selecting the song I want, and then reconnecting it. This is a much more dangerous behavior.
The problems here are that it is SO limited that it is very difficult to accomplish a task. Beyond that, even a passenger can't navigate the app easily. You can't do anything when parked either. Even maps has this problem where it essentially forces you to use voice command but that doesn't work well so you say the same thing 5 times trying to get it right or do the above thing where you disconnect.
Car Play is one of those things where it seems like the developers thought long and hard about how to do things but didn't actually look at how people use the system in the real world.
I've found that the best programs are the ones under the control of a single benevolent dictator. They can maintain their focus and consistency much better than any other structure.
I Concur. Even though i am still not a fan, since his psrsonality was really offputting to me, Steve Jobs way able to do that. And he even was able to put it into words: "Stay hungry". Complacency begets Mediocrity at best (or worse).
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 given. You can't just burn Rome to the ground, rebuild it in a day, and expect everything to be fine. For the love of god, at least do testing to show that this the cost doesn't outweigh the benefits.
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, it's fine, we just need to tidy things up a bit here and there" people might question why they were hired for a lot of money.
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.
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.
Having worked in the mobile space for the last decade, it is my experience that these UI/X changes usually are a side effect of new management (after a purge) or from way on high (the c-suite).
Neither one of these groups know much about UI/X but hold strong personal opinions which they automatically believe must hold true for all users.
I am currently in a tug of war over such UI/X change for a feature in a banking application, making the case that we have plenty of older users who will have massive issues with the current redesign.
My suggestions on performing user testing on the new design to validate them has not received much support over the last weeks.
And so, I have started looking around for other opportunities on the market (this is also why places with bad UI/X continue doing so, they select for the people who are ok with making it).
My pet theory is that Spotify doesn't want you to choose your own music but steer you towards specific songs instead. Either to increase your level or length of engagement with the service, or because some songs earn them more cash than others.
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.
That or some designers are opinionated and more interested in making their mark on a design, compared with understanding and advocating for their userbase.
Honestly I've heard this line more from designers than any other field:
"We can't add that feature/button because it's too confusing"
Usually the above statement is conflicting with reality and the request to add the feature/button is to give the UI clarity (or worse, provide the feature the customer asked for!)
> It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it.
One reason is that UI is a fashion-driven space so as the fashion changes there is increasing pressure to rewrite everything to look like all recent apps look, even if it breaks functionality.
Another reason is that if an application has a well-polished UI that all users love.. what's the UI team going to do? How does that newly hired UI PM get to make a big impact so they get a promotion? So there's also a lot of resume-driven UI change for the sake of change.
For the second problem, a partial solution is to have shared UI teams so they can keep busy improving the products which need the most improvement and leave alone the ones that are already good. Of course, hard to do in a smaller company that might only have one product.
For the fashion problem, no good solution. Ignoring fashion entirely works for software that targets technical people but for mass-market applications, no good solution.
Purely the justification of their own job. Open up any settings window in Windows 10. The title bar and the window contents are the exact same color, making it impossible to tell where exactly you need to click to drag the window. In a sane world the programmer responsible for that would be out on their ass.
There is one simple reason that enables all the shit mentioned in other replies: as much as we like to pretend, the impact of design is very hard to measure.
A product experience is nuanced, part of a journey, with learning curves, preferences and problems. Much of this is completely ignored in the measurement of the success of design changes.
There are lots of reasons people tend to screw with things that are fine, but the root cause is that they get away with it. Hell, they even get rewarded for it.
This seems like a solved problem as well. Don't people use focus groups anymore? Or have an open feedback forum where people can submit feedback and use user ratings to see which issues are the most important to the most users.
Many companies already do have forums like this and they're filled with UI complaints having sometimes thousands of upvotes, but it's all for nothing because almost none of them actually use that feedback.
My bet is still on "UI design isn't a full-time job, it's project work, so UI designers have to keep moving things around to stay relevant in one company". As much as I don't like outsourcing, having a bunch of designers on your payroll with nothing to do most days but still needing to pass all the employee rating crap is bound to result in an unstable and never good enough UI.
In every company I have worked in on the frontend, this is the answer.
"We need to increase x" comes down from somewhere, and then everyone attempts to find a good way to measure increase/decrease of x and then come up with a design that increases x.
I have never been in a company where a UX or UI designer had leverage to redesign anything just for the hell of it.
This is quite obviously the answer, and UI design isn't a skill like software where your boss can say "If you've finish your work, start a new project." We don't need more UI designs like we need more useful/efficient software.
Imagine If software engineers could get paid to constantly refactor the code and change APIs -- oh, wait, API devs do, for the same reason.
I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons.
I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid. I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play music on command without missing a beat. They have since redone the site to make it look more trendy and more Spotify-ish. This new skin brought bugs with it and it's not the reliable workhorse it used to be. It's still way better than Spotify though.
I am very sensitive to buggy software. And in my opinion, most software available today is just riddled with bugs. I completely switched away from Apple because of this for example. To me, this is the real tragedy of modern software. The bad UX, the dark patterns, the slowness, etc... None of this stuff bothers me all that much when it comes down to it. But bugs, bugs get me every time.
There's a good unofficial Rust library for Spotify called librespot that powers some great terminal clients. I use ncspot and it's pretty good once you learn the weird quirks (e.g. song radio is buried deep in a context menu).
Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to lose money it has little reason to care if customers cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose interest.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I think bugginess just doesn't affect bottom lines of most companies these days, hence the state we're in. Also, anecdotally, I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time.
" I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time."
Most people probably blame themself of not getting it.
Or throw hands in the air of what to do about it.
And most don't know that you can make software that fits to the user needs and not the other way around.
OpenSource could have potential here, but most free software developers are not really into UX design either and seem to expect the same tech level of their audience as they have.
If your users don't have another option, or your product has serious network effects, users will keep coming back. From Fast Company 2016:
"To test its users’ loyalty, Facebook sometimes made its Android app crash for several hours over the course of several years. ... Users were so hooked that they “never stopped coming back,” despite the errors."
Are you equating "bottom line" with revenue? Is that why you feel this is a contradiction? Bottom line also has a more general definition of "the company's end goal". If the bugs don't impact Spotify's goals, then they are not motivated to fix them.
What do you mean by « Spotify is designed to lose money »? Also, a decrease in number of users will definitely worry Spotify and draw negative investors’ attention.
How do you even run a company like that? Sounds soulless af.
I mean, sure make money for your investors, but shouldn't you also try to fulfill your mission statement? Or is the mission statement only to make the share price go up?
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.
Glad to hear you switched away from listening to podcasts on Spotify. Their attempt to buy up a huge number of podcasts in the last couple of years, which resulted in exclusification of some of those podcasts, is an awful development in the previously free and open podcasting community. I love podcasts and I'd prefer to be able to keep listening to all of my favorite podcasts on whatever app I want.
But also before moving away, I was subscribed to one of the ones they made exclusive, Gimlet Media's something-science I think it was called. Enjoyable and fairly informative much of the time, but if they are going to create a gated community I'm just not going to be part of making that a success, so I immediately stopped listening & recommending it and unsubscribed.
I'm familiar with how they operate and my opinion is that they screwed it up by hiring too many devs and setting up the teams based on software components.
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.
“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example”
Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support integrations with changing business partners, changes to regulatory requirements, etc. I’m sure some devs pulled late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.
> Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies.
Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now.
A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn?
And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
All of the bullcrap the banks are doing mostly serves one purpose: get you to buy more of their products at terms that are bad for you.
All the complaints I have against the UX of the banking websites and apps I use can be attributed to this: they do a shitty job on purpose, because the site/app is primarily a vector to upsell you loans, credit cards and insurance.
(All complaints except one: the bank I used for my business accounts when contracting decided to make an SPA with one of the trendy JavaScript frameworks. Well, they botched it. This failure doesn't even help them sell anything, it's just the usual webdev incompetence.)
Because part of it being shitty is obnoxiously advertising you financial products, making it hard to perform the tasks you want with your money without being upsold something, and making it near-impossible to use your account without going through the app/webapp (or a visit to the bank, or the ATM - which is also pushing ads).
> As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it.
I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on
a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit
I believe the point is that all those services have existed for Quite Some Time, don’t need consumer-facing changes, and any additional consumer-facing software changes are bunk.
> A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.
all of the areas I mentioned are subject to constant change, mostly from regulators
implementing the Payment Services Directive, Solvency II or MiFID II all require developers
the developers working on the app/website that you interact with are always going to be a small fraction of the developers that work for a bank
and if you think this isn't the case (in a very cut-throat industry), I would suggest you start a bank and put the rest of them out of business with your vastly reduced costs
Computers allowed the development of ACH, debit cards, and ATMs. They gave us the ability to bank by phone, and by web. But, I think your general point, sans snark, is correct in that I can’t think of any significant, novel banking service that’s been introduced since about the 1970s. (I count ACH as novel, because it enables you to do things you couldn’t do before. Banking at home in your pajamas isn’t any different than waiting until Monday morning and physically going to the bank.)
Modern payment support; Keeping up with regulatory changes; Keeping up with regulatory report of the year; Updating risk systems to account for modern mortgage risks; Expanding integrations to other countries; Keeping up with OS changes for existing apps; Responding on court data requests
You’d think so, but my wife uses a bank that spent a good 12 years without a substantial change to their website. It finally got a major refresh a few years back and everything just FELT better. It was like fixing up the lobby- it might be secondary to the primary purpose of being there, but it made it a better experience for the customer.
That’s ignoring things like online bill pay, mobile banking, and roll outs of new financial products that really are innovations from the last 10-15 years.
Regulatory change, 3rd party API changes, new financial products (often arising out of the regulatory changes) all require ongoing development.
Plus I don't know about you, but my bank's website and app are a hot mess. In theory I suppose they could be feature complete, but in reality, nope.
So, just visiting Earth, or are you here to stay? :)
I've worked for banks and while there's certainly plenty of unwarranted churn the notion that they're done and the dev team can go home is ... hilarious.
Edit: addressing your comment in an adjacent thread, a box to keep your money in (or, canonically, a sock under the mattress) does not need to offer/support:
- Debit cards
- Credit bureaus. Yes, even if it's just a deposit account and no, this isn't optional.
- Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations
- Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks
That's before you get into other account types, offering credit, currency conversions and the zillion other things that sock doesn't have to do.
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.
>I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature.
Most users will though. Apple music implements that feature and charges the same amount for subscriptions. So if spotify wants to stay competitive they need a team of developers to keep up with whatever Apple and Google are doing. It's not good enough to just say "oh well the app is feature complete so we won't be working on anything new"
Nothing is ever feature complete when you have competition.
I have finally got the option to test “Download to Apple Watch”, so only took Spotify 2-3 years after the feature was made available? Not sure if it’s widely available yet
Had to buy the 4G version last time though, as Apples podcast and Music app is horrible at downloading, and Overcast was not much better.
I surrendered and bought the app Outcast. With it you can directly download podcasts on the Apple Watch. You have to disable Bluethooth on your iPhone, though, otherwise the downloads will be slow as hell.
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.
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.
A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.
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.
The big difference is that if a competent plumber looks at a sink, it will take them 30 seconds to figure out. If a competent programmer looks at a new codebase with 30000 lines of code, it will take them 6 months to understand it, and then still be missing 80% of the details.
Yes, sure. For online services, that would be all the people involved with maintaining infrastructure. But my point is that construction workers are no longer needed for that particular building once it's completed. Yet, somehow, apps and websites are never completed. They're always changing for no good reason.
But there are all kinds of code-level changes that end up being necessary, even if you never want any new features. You can't just have sysadmins and expect to run a service over the Internet.
What kinds of changes? Operating systems are also feature-complete and don't need that yearly release cycle. They only need updating if there are new hardware capabilities that need to be exposed to applications. And security patches don't change APIs.
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.
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 all layers of layers of things that work. There's rarely a time for fundamental restructuring of the codebase to meet the new requirement correctly.
Once the cracks begin to show, we start thinking of software rewrite.
For a construction of buildings, the redevelopment is about once 40 years, for software, it's about 5-7 years.
> 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).
"A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example."
How else will all those SVP's at your bank justify their fat salaries? They NEED more minions. Same goes for VC ecosystem. Funny how everyone has a scapegoat or a solution to this supposed software quality problem, not quite understanding the underlying financial incentives. Easy money -> rotten management -> crappy design.
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.
>I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time.
My favorite regression is probably how the Windows client finally had type-to-search functionality for adding new songs to an existing playlist, and now it doesn't again. The Linux client still has it though!
This is to say nothing of their radio algorithm regression.
We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex...
So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.
I can only assume one of their metrics is the classic "time on app" or "user engagement" which is a bullshit metric for a music player. If I'm spending more time on the app then that clearly means I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
I generally agree with engagement being a BS metric, I'm not sure I agree in this case, unless we separate out time I'm actively interacting with the app and time I'm listening to music and only call the former BS. When I first switched to Spotify from Google Play, I listened to a lot more music because the recommendation algorithm pointed me at a ton of music I ended up looking a lot. Now its recommendations have gotten to samey and my engagement declined. I'd love for them to improve recommendations and drive my engagement up that way.
Now, similar example is Netflix. I've at times reached a point where I think I had watched everything on the platform I'd enjoy. Their UI keeps showing old stuff as new tough, different pictures for the same show, etc. This led to wasted time and frustrating engagement. (Aside: the best Netflix UI ever was a script I wrote myself when they still had a public API that just listed all movies ordered by how much they predicted I'd like it. That paired with IMDB ratings and filtered by what I've already have seen would be the holy Grail but it would be obvious when it's time to unsubscribe for a while)
Sometimes it's hard to spot long term degradation of quality via short term experiments. Each little thing shows uplift, but overall it gets crapperier.
Most probably - metrics tend to be focused on something advertisers like to hear, like page views (paginate your artist listings for more page views!), scroll-downs (add loads of whitespace and padding and large artist photos), video watches (play the video in the background of the page), song plays (make it hard to find the song you want, so you try 10 until you find the right one...)
Given so many metrics are either time or attention based, they probably are opposed to user experience (less time needed to achieve the task).
Or rather, they're trying to align user behaviour. Since customers have very little choice in the matter (most popular SaaS products tend to resist commodification, so there's no equivalent competitor to jump to), these metric-driven approaches often effectively become PID controllers, driving user behaviours to a desired trajectory.
> 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.
Google Play was perfect for playing the .mp3 files on my Android phone. No need for an internet connection. Then suddenly it was ripped away, and YouTube is not remotely a replacement. I still haven't found an adequate replacement because I don't know how to search for the features that are important to me.
> At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again
I work at a tech company, and I’ll offer my take on why this didn’t happen.
Some growth oriented organizations incentivize product people to keep iterating and “improving” a product. Then, product people are on the hook to show some kind of measurable improvement in some metric. Otherwise, they miss out on promotions, or worst case, they get pushed out.
What I’ve seen happen is some elegant, simple UX that no one ever complained about suddenly morphs into a convoluted, busy mess of its former self. But hey, as long as some A/B test shows an increase in click through rate or total engagement time - great! Mission accomplished!
The root cause is these teams and product people don’t really obsess with the product or the customer experience. They’re incentivized towards optimizing some metric - which at face value appears like optimizing it would provide a better product. But it turns out that’s not the case.
These people all get promoted, pat themselves on the back, and move on. Slowly, the engineering teams realize that these business requirements and stringent launch dates led to a convoluted architecture. We can no longer move quickly or truly innovate. It honestly turns into death by a thousand cuts, where the second and third order effects of the incentive structure ultimately results in a not so great experience. It actually becomes increasingly expensive to fix the past mistakes… the reason could be compatibility or versioning issues, a mess of dependencies and services that no one really understands, or even just a general fear of breaking things and not having clarity on how to get back on track.
It might be that team A has the right senior leadership, but they rely on team or org B to fix issues or update some code. But that other team or org has their own product people, with their own priorities. They couldn’t care less.
What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record. Sometimes it’s disengagement and other times it’s fear of coming off as a negative person. Because the immense complexity is too difficult to solve by one person alone, and they honestly don’t have a solution that people would really get behind.
Slowly the engineers burn out or feel disengaged. The great engineering talent ends up leaving. You end up with the career people or the disengaged people who are coasting by. At the end of the day, the customer suffers. We stopped obsessing with the customer experience. It’s turned overwhelmingly into cross team or cross org politics, salesmanship, and often times people focusing on the wrong problems (inventing solutions to problems that don’t even exist) while the obvious thing is right in front of them.
>What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record.
While internally I nod my head and 'agree' that all the above points must be true, the lack of voices on why we have such seemingly random UI changes bothers me on this subject.
There must be tens of thousands, if not higher, of UI/UX designers, and while I struggle a little to believe that Product Management is in such a sorry shape that PMs feel the need to change for the sake of change, it's harder for me to believe that we don't hear more complaints/post-mortems from the UI/UX devs out there. Surely not everyone is under some iron-clad NDA or is so afraid of their employer they won't even try with some throwaway accounts to tell the story of Management's lust for changing UI...
The sad (specious) conclusion I reach is that UI/UX changes that seem bad probably have far more thought put into complaint articles than the UI/UX/PM team ever had with the change in the first place. Whatever the motivation or justification is, seems the real reason for a lot of the changes from such softwares is 'what're the users going to do about it?', in most cases, the company already has their money...why care if you already recouped the on-boarding cost and then some?
> 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't fix it".
Presumably Spotify makes more money if you listen to artist A instead of artist B, and these changes are all part of the gradual change from an interface designed to let you browse and discover music you like to an interface designed to make you do whatever makes Spotify the most money that day.
> 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.
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 radio and DJs are selecting things (perhaps the 'DJ' selecting has just been replaced/attempted to be duplicated locally by software I guess). The way people listen changed. Not a fan of it at all, but that's where the 'unsolved'ness comes from. IMO the way people listen became even more passive and lazy and the huge portion of the market that just streams whatever puts little to no effort into their music (read: people who 'like all kinds of music') and that's what's just fine by Spotify.
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.
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 users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."
I was very sorry to notice Spotify getting worse and worse. It seems that now the app won’t display anything without an internet connection, or certain items that were downloaded don’t appear in the list. What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?
The desktop app is also getting worse. After a certain period of time clicking play simply has no effect, so it needs to be regularly restarted.
I don’t normally enjoy these pile-ons complaining about a product, but I have the feeling it’s coming apart at the seams
> What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?
I've never understood that either. I have downloaded quite a few albums for offline listening throughout the years but now I have no way of removing them because there's no listing. From time to time I still stumble upon an album marked as downloaded so I get that one chance to remove it.
I understand the point of the downloading media over wifi rather than mobile data. What I'm saying is that once I'm "offline" I can't navigate to a screen where I can click play on them
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.
The pushing of podcasts too much is what got me to leave Spotify too. I tried YouTube music for a while but I wasn't a fan of how my YouTube likes would get mixed up with the YouTube music. Disabling the setting would often get rid of songs too.
So I ended up buying a cheap Android phone ($190 USD for a very good phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space):
Companies with 6 billions dollars in revenue don't really pivot. They are diversifying.
I guess they have determined it makes sense strategically. If I had to guess, podcasts and music listening are rival goods for a lot of their most valuable segments and they were worried about moves some of the new entrants in the market could have made. Might allow them to target new customers too. Hopefully more than the move will lose them in existing customers jumping ship.
Spotify essentially have no excess profit potential for music, because the labels will just take more money if and when Spotify increases subscribers/revenue.
This is in contrast to Podcasts, where nobody really owns the space, and they have a good shot at becoming the market leader.
I mean, I hate podcasts and wish they would go away from my Spotify, but I like the company and the music product, so I put up with it (for now, at least).
I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but not the song title and I have to literally search through his discography. But even that is doable in one click (see discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just tapping on it.
For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library
From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel.
Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. If I could figure out how to port ten thousand songs in a 150 playlists...
As an iOS user who has experienced some of these same issues, I can assure you that nobody at Spotify cares about my platform's app experience either.
The "continuing to play audio after bt disconnect" is particularly obnoxious to me, and has been happening for something like 5 years now. The latest update has trouble just scrolling through my entire Library, because why would anyone have more than a few dozen followed artists!?!?! (I have a couple hundred, and the latest update forced artists, playlists, and albums all to list together into one enormous muddle in Library).
That may be just it. I've been a paid pro user for almost a decade (back before and when their app was good); I ultimately abandoned my subscription when I realized I don't use the service much anymore (something about them suddenly losing quite a lot of mainstream-ish music).
That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.
I can’t figure it out on Premium either, but if it’s actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it’s a money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or something.
The Playstation app and Android TV apps randomly desync the UI from the content being played. It seems particularly problematic with Daily Mixes that change from time to time. Selecting a song (or hitting next) basically selects a completely random song to play.
The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.
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".
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.
They’ve also removed the persistent search bar and replaced it with a menu item called ‘Search’. I always fumble now because I wonder where the search box is, first I scroll up thinking it’s out of view then I remember it’s been moved behind a click.
According to my GF, who is a UX researcher, Spotify has a large UX research team of interesting people.
All I can imagine is that there is some confusion at Spotify and the developers must have the sign backwards, thinking that research findings are what not to do. It’s a consistently shitty experience.
On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener, but ever since Spotify has acquired it I have ultimately stopped listening to it.
And so many free podcast apps have been around for over a decade, demonstrating that there are many simple ways to play podcasts right. But I guess they can't get basic music navigation and library curation right either, and that seemed to work pretty well in 2005.
Oh man. I discover an album I really love, and next time it takes such effort to find my way back to it. But that silly, boring podcast I listened to for a few minutes last year? It's the first thing I see when I open the app.
I'm in this exact same situation. Now it shows Joe Rogan in the "your shows" section and there is simply no way to get rid of it. So annoying. And I have to struggle to find the album I added to my library a couple days ago.
Another example is Netflix. You used to click on a movie to bring up the info page so you could see what its about and see its reviews. If you wanted to play it, you'd click on it from there.
But now, if you click on a movie, it starts playing immediately. If you want to see what it's about, you hover over the movie, wait for it to expand, then click a small caret symbol to expand the movie page further to see details.
And if you want to see reviews or customer ratings, too bad because Netflix decided those aren't useful so you have to go to IMDB or some other site to see what other people thought about it.
Agree here. That's annoying. That's why I try to see the reviews somewhere else, before starting the movie. I'm also using different streaming apps reviewed on https://www.firesticktricks.com/best-apps-for-jailbroken-fir... that don't require so long process and show the info beforehand. It's time consuming. Netflix should think about it.
One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing.
I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player.
I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.
When do you have that problem? I see big controls right below the song if I'm in player mode. If I'm searching for more songs while playing the song is on the bottom with a pause/play option and tapping the song returns to player mode with all controls. Is that different for you?
Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable.
All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...
The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer folks...
As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and the most boring features survive.
Ps. I was one of the involved on that feature. I didn't write it (It was done in Sweden), but I created one of the earlier demos, (and patents), and that eventually became touch to preview.
This seems very plausible, as an outsider looking in. There's also the problem of when new people get hired and out in charge of new sections of the product, and they feel that they either need to make a change to justify their existence, or that they have found something that really works well for the way that they use the product without realizing the variety of ways that the user base uses the product.
I thought it was interesting how Spotify acquihired uTorrent's creator, Ludvig Strigeus, to build the Spotify desktop client. uTorrent was tiny and fast and written in c++, and early versions of Spotify were also small and incredibly snappy. I assume the move to Electron was a necessity to support a team of hundreds all working on the client, but it's still regrettable.
I suspect it was more the economics of maintaining 5 apps: web, mac, windows, iphone, android. It basically forces you to a toolkit that makes nobody happy...
What is really sad about Spotify is where it comes from.
The original player (in QT, iirc) was incredibly good : light (some mb of RAM), fast, zero bloat, well crafted UI.
I signed up for Spotify because it was an incredible product, but I stay because I’m forced to (shared family account and nothing really better in terms of bloating).
Sometimes those stories makes me wonder that the golden age of « life changing » software is behind us (I’d say exactly the same thing with Dropbox).
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.
Sadly, the Apple Music app on macOS also has major issues. For example, I’ll open it and try to search, and the results view says “Showing results for ‘query’” followed by a bunch of unrelated songs and albums. Running the search again actually produces results.
Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least search works the first time.
I tried Apple Music when I realized the HomePod Mini can’t play songs from Spotify. Try as I might, Apple Music just didn’t cut it for me. The biggest annoyance was the playlists and discovery features. It was MUCH harder to find a playlist/radio station for a particular mood.
The mobile app is also appalling. The Apple CarPlay integration is shonky and seems like it's intentionally designed to ensure you inadvertently kill yourself in an auto accident.
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 stuff I like. Their UX gets worse every update. I miss the era of non-updating apps. Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?
> 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 and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.
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).
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.
Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs.
Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all the artists you’ve liked before, which makes it hard to go back to song you liked years ago before they made the “follow” change.
I have to kind of disagree, my experience with Spotify desktop which I use daily (almost don't use the mobile app) was from awful to bad.
I still find it hard to navigate and find things, and the performance is bad, but before was really really bad, the last iterations come out well for me.
I will like more features.
For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc.
Also improve the Library feature, I want to order/filter all my albums by year, decade, genre, artist.
A "listen later" feature on albums and songs will be great too, I want to have a place to "test" music, and later add it or not to my Library or Liked songs.
Lately the streaming platforms and the music industry is focusing on songs more than albums, and this is reflected on the features that their apps have. I find great the power that playlists give to consumers, but I find that the album experience give me a layer of artistic exploration that can't be captured with playlists, discovery weekly, top charts, etc.
> For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc.
This kind of thing boggles my mind. An album, a playlist, the current queue, these are all lists of songs. They ought to be implemented by the same model under the hood. You ought to be able to do the same set of actions to any of them - add to a playlist, add to the queue, etc. But for some reason you can only do some of things to some of the lists of songs and that changes depending on which client you are using.
This is not unique to Spotify either, Amazon Music had the same issues.
I feel a bit bad plugging my own project (sorry not sorry i guess), but i wrote a macOS app to scratch my itch, because for years i've hated the Spotify interface (especially the queueing aspect).
So let's analyze this for a minute, first at a general level of incentives that every software-building org has, then at the specific level of Spotify's founding culture and present incentives.
Generally: ideally we imagine UX & product roles as creating a strong experience rewarding the user on for their engagement, by user standards. In practice, in order advance their career, these roles need a narrative of wins they can sell to higher management. That usually means change one can take credit for, if possible paired with a metric management is invested in. Sometimes this metric is even connected with a rewarding experience for users. Sometimes. The incentive for change is there, though, regardless, at least as long as there's money in the dev budget for it.
Spotify Specifically: was founded under the premise that consumers could be drawn into a product that acts like a record collection buffet in the cloud, but only pay broadcast prices! (ie, free or flat rate). This premise was correct, but also relied on the idea that Spotify was entitled to pay artists broadcast-royalties while effect occupying the space where recording royalties used to live, cannibalizing the market for recordings. And so you get execs telling artists that it's "entitled" to want rates as high as a penny a listen for their music and Spotify wasn't built to solve the problem of artists getting paid it was built to solve the problem of piracy (artists not being able to get paid or set their prices is indistinguishable from the problems of piracy). [0] This tells us that either Spotify isn't getting enough revenue to pay a penny a stream, or it feels entitled to keep what it is collecting.
And here's what else we know about Spotify: their revenue per user is essentially fixed. Their model doesn't have much in the way to collect more from a user based off the users own values/actions. They can increase ads, but that's probably not a user driven win. What else can they do?
Well, they can do what the rest of the social media companies do with their feeds. Randomize appearance of content, mix in known engaging user rewards with other things that let Spotify sell user attention -- to a label or individual trying to promote music/audio in a given space, to third parties wanting to advertise or place another content.
That degrades user experience? Sure. You think the company that is founded down to the core on exploitation cares even a little bit about that? Especially now that they're such a huge name in music they outshine Apple in a lot of markets?
Eventually, I suppose, other people will be dissatisfied in the same ways you are and maybe in a snowballing number of ways caused by the kind of bad-incentives driven rot. But it's likely to be a long slow ride down the curve, with an exodus as fast and complete as FB.
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.
Worse than that is offline functionality (on Android, at least). If I don't have good cell service, my "offline", "downloaded" albums just won't load up, and it's infuriating.
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 it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes alongside security patches.
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. :)
The last one that could be made to look like NT4 / W2K; yeah, definitely the best all in all. (Though it was of course somewhat bloated from all the .NET stuff.)
Sounds like Spotify is going down Pandora's path then.
It's amazing how several different stations started from the same genre will narrowly converge even after explicitly disliking different subgenre-specific songs on each station. But that's been Pandora for years now; why I still revisit it time to time is beyond me.
I tried using the Spotify desktop player a few years ago when I first subscribed to their service. I found the application to be a real resource hog compared to any other desktop music player (such as VLC, Audacious, Foobar2k or Winamp). It also lacked the usability and many of the features of these older players but the deal-breaker for me was that it didn’t support gap-less playback which ruins the experience of listening to live albums or DJ mixes.
I think it shows a shift in priorities from users to metrics like engagement and profit. Then the prioritized parties are Spotify or investors. It stinks, but it opens the door for competitors that can compete on things like user experience even though there are powerful competitors already in the space.
Have you tried to use the iTunes app on desktop? It’s pretty horrendous too. Been using it for more than a decade and it’s slowly gotten better but the integration with iTunes match and apple music is really weird.
> 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 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.
This was one of the biggest hiring challenges at my most recent large project: iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift. Android developers wanted to rewrite everything in Kotlin. Our web app was already written in React, but the web developers constantly wanted to refactor it to use the latest state management trend. When Hooks were introduced in React, we spent far too long arguing with developers who wanted to refactor all of the working code to use hooks instead.
The bigger problem is that nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase. Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look good on their resume going into the next job. Some of the most talented developers we hired were obviously only interested in using our company as a stepping stone to FAANG jobs (which didn't actually pay much more, but they were more prestigious on a resume so they wanted to switch).
Blaming product managers is an easy out and will likely match popular opinion among people who aren't product managers, but the problem extends to development teams as well.
I'm an Android developer who despises Kotlin and all the other trendy stuff. I often get laughed at for my views. However, my apps are ridiculously slim and fast, so there's that. Oh and I don't have a job.
It really feels to me as if developers these days care much more about the development process itself, and how their code looks, than about the end product of their work that the users see. Same for designers — they want their UIs look "clean" and enjoyed like works of art, disregarding obvious, glaring UX issues that arise when any person at all tries to use the thing.
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 to make entirely too much money at their favorite hobby: reinventing and overcomplicating the wheel.
To be fair, the user profile also changed a lot over the years. What used to be a 'programmer for power user' space, now it's all about minimalism and pretty, dysfunctional interfaces. I can see why one would become jaded and separate themselves from users.
Also another problem that doesn't seem to be talked about a lot is that way too often, the stake holders and the developers have nothing in common with the end user.
As I see it, it's plain and simple: companies want to make all the money in the world at any cost. This "growth" is how they measure their success among each other. But caring for their users and treating them as adults with agency doesn't earn as much as manipulating them into doing something they never intended. And this manipulation drives the ongoing dumbing down of everything. Back in the day, if you were annoyed by something in a piece of software, you went looking for a setting to make it your way, and more often than not, you found and changed it. No more.
Apple in particular is a good example here. They used to position themselves as a company that makes great tools that empower people. But now they're putting their own agenda, and, conveniently, bottom line, before that. That's how we end up with endless redesigns of things that worked perfectly fine for everyone (e.g. safari).
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.
Runtime efficiency is just one consideration to be balanced against others. Maybe you would have an easier time getting a job if you would accept the new stuff and be willing to compromise on runtime efficiency so your team could crank out more features and more quickly meet its business goals. Note: the issue isn't your individual productivity; being willing to go along with the pack has its own advantages.
I don't want to work at a place that has "business goals". I don't want to work on a proprietary product either. I just want to use my skills to make the world a better place, and moving money around ain't that. I don't want to participate in the rat race or help it in any shape or form.
Having business goals isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's possible to develop a good product that improves the lives of its users, while compromising on some things so the business can sell the product before it runs out of money. The money from those sales can then be used to fund more worthwhile work. It may be hard to find a position at a company that lives up to that ideal, but it's possible. I believe my cofounder and I are trying to do that with our bootstrapped company (but we're not currently hiring). You have to be willing to compromise on some ideals though; I struggle with that myself.
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 developer for several years. It was amazing when Pavel Durov was still the CEO. I was living the dream. It all went downhill form there when it was acquired by mail.ru group and I had to quit because it started feeling like an abusive relationship. My app being closed-source didn't help either.
Then was Telegram. Same Pavel, mostly same team, but the tasks were much more ambitious, and the product itself much more complex and internally intertwined (every single update touches the chat screen, which in the Android app is more than a megabyte of pure Java). I did the VoIP library from scratch. In hindsight, this certainly isn't a one-person endeavor, but I didn't know any better. So, yeah, eventually, but very unexpectedly, I was fired by that same person who I was a huge fan of for so many years. The reasoning was that "our calls are shit". Apparently I was supposed to write code that didn't contain bugs and just "test it myself". Oh all those foolish other companies having QAs, right?
I have no idea where to go now. I want my 2011 back. I want to be passionate about something again.
I would suggest the crypto industry, specifically DeFi. Reasoning:
* It's (mostly) all open-source.
* It's self-directed. Don't like a team? There are a dozen others waiting scrambling for developers that you can join with no bureaucracy nonsense. Want to work alone? The tools are mostly mature enough that you can release products as a one man team.
* You seem to have disinterest or even aversion towards money, from its role in tricking people into mindless jobs. DeFi is about the roots of what money is, voluntary transfer of value between people, which is something I think everybody can agree is fundamentally good.
To be honest, I don't really believe in crypto. All the blockchain stuff is mostly solutions looking for problems. And, after all these years, cryptocurrencies still haven't replaced regular money. I still can't buy a coffee with bitcoin. There were numerous efforts to create such a cryptocurrency, but they've all failed — because governments aren't letting go of the control they have over everything, and they have the necessary physical force to enforce these views. Currently, all I see about cryptocurrencies, is people mostly using them for trading or see them as an investment. Sometimes they buy drugs with them. And that's really it.
Though, yes, if I wanted easy money, I could go work at such a company. Or I could as well go to a FAANG-ish megacorp and earn craploads by working an hour a day.
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.
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 whose purpose it is to disappoint existing customers who like what's already there".
There may be an argument that you'll draw in more people with shiny stuff, than you'll lose when you break old stuff. I only have anecdotes and personal experience that that's untrue [digg? reddit? metro?], and no examples of cases showing that argument to be right.
Also, personally I get my jollies working on other people's old code. I work with several FORTRAN codebases that pre-date my birth, and I enjoy it.
> 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 good example of the struggle of middle management: You get blamed from all sides for just trying to do the job you're assigned.
Developers get 1-2 years at a job before they fall behind in compensation.
So my resume always needs to be fresh. I can’t be working with older technology because when it comes time to jump again, I won’t have the skills to do so.
Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.
Devs have a lot of the same incentives product managers do.
That may contribute, but we saw the same pattern in devs who had been there for 5-10 years.
I also see the same pattern in "Ask HN" posts and many comments here from people venting about how they've started so many side projects but can never finish them. Starting new projects is fun. Shipping things can be hard and requires some tolerance for boredom.
A lot of people get into the field because they like to program and play with new programming things. Regardless of jobs or compensation, there's a strong pull toward doing new and different things. There's also a strong aversion to working on someone else's project.
Shipping products is boring when the products themselves are boring. That’s why people want to work at small companies who have a lot more stakes in each releases and pay close attention to what they build, how it reaches market and make it evolves after.
To throw another log in this rant bone fire, a few decades ago software was seen as harder and more expensive, and while there was some frivolous and/or stupid apps, big enough development projects were usually bound to some purpose.
Our industry in its current form is more open to build meaningless things and trash after a while. I knew devs who were specialized in home page redesigns, and they viewed it as facelifts to show the client company is still alive. It has a business purpose, but in the grand scheme of things the only person that really enjoyed the project was the guy using it to learn vue.js.
Or a team porting an app from Objective-C to React native, not because they think it’s shiny but because hiring is hard/expensive and/or the business wants to have one size fits all apps for iOs and android.
> ”Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.”
The FAANGs have tons of Objective-C code. The largest and most popular iOS apps in the world are actively developed in Obj-C and C++.
It’s absurd to me that mobile developers actively undermine their ability to get those extremely well-paid jobs by limiting themselves to one language.
Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.
The impact a language has on your career prospects is U-shaped. Knowing new languages is good for your career. Stagnating on an 'old' language is bad (Swift is only 7 years old...). But eventually knowing the old language puts you back in demand again, to port and support old codebases.
>Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.
This just sounds insane to me being a non-programmer. Literally nothing in my job requires me to be up to date on technologies that are less than 10 years old to be considered for a job.
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.
It's much worse in ecosystems that are changing the core frameworks at a rapid pace (hi, React!). If you don't do the same thing Facebook does internally, and continually refactor your entire codebase onto the latest paradigms, you quickly end up unable to adopt new features and 3rd party libraries when you actually need to do so.
If you look instead at a mature ecosystem, like, say, C++ or Java, you might reasonably maintain a codebase for a decade without needing to adopt new language features.
Fait point. I would also add: blame the AB test culture that has creeped in everywhere. I am pretty confident that the current layout of the Spotify UI is not the result of a design team but the outcome of hundreds of back-to-back AB tests (some of them coming out positive, to the benefit of the career of the ideator)
Resume driven development strikes again! Everyone just wants to use the latest shiny thing then switch jobs and leave the pile of burning mess to the next sucker.
Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.
> Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.
But YNAB is also a great example of apps-getting-worse — you're explicitly praising the 2012 version over the 2015/evergreen version.
(In YNAB's case, they had business reasons to make the app worse (or thought they did), but I bet that's true of many of the examples in TFA)
I can't really blame them for their new webapp. They've built a great product that doesn't really need any further maintenance. It'd be pretty weird after they finish YNAB4 to just say, "Ok we're done, let's disband the company".
Blaming the engineers for wanting to follow trends is really passing the buck. Blame the industry (hiring managers, ctos, investors, etc) for not hiring people who don’t have the exact skill set that they’re looking for. To be competitive (aka get paid well) in today’s marketplace you need to have a skill set that is with whatever trends are most common.
I’m fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn’t care that I haven’t worked on Kotlin or React. But I was passed up by many companies because I didn’t have react experience - can’t help it if my last few jobs were all angular.
Many engineers are focusing on doing what will help them get the most compensation. And following industry trends is part of that.
Wanting to be competitive (aka getting paid well) is the root of the problem. The top jobs are ridiculous in every field. Because there is so much competition for them, competitiveness becomes orthogonal to doing your job well.
In most fields, there are also second-tier jobs. You get to enjoy a nice middle-class lifestyle with a good work-life balance in a stable long-term job. The incentives are there to do your job well, because you have to face the consequences of your choices. I know plenty of software engineers in jobs like that. When the company eventually goes bad, they have no trouble finding new similar jobs, because good experienced software engineers are scarce.
When is a product complete? One day it must be unless the builders are hopeless
Surely there must be a point where the product functions as intended and the peak number of users like it like that. Instead we carry on. Everyone has to keep proving their 'value' right? Always changing, always growing. Everything eventually gets iterated to death. Any piece of software or design, no matter how much you might like it will eventually be replaced. It's as true of software as it is of car shapes or curtain patterns.
Just imagine being the CEO of Evernote (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) announcing to the world that they are feature complete. It's a finished product and they are laying off everyone except customer support and marketing. They would be considered insane despite that decision delivering the best profits and customer experience.
> Android developers wanted to rewrite everything in Kotlin.
Probably because Google says Kotlin is the way. You can't use Compose, Google's reboot of the View system, from Java. Why did google create Compose? To eliminate a decade of cruft and problems for one, so congrats ... now your developers are stuck with it.
I've seen devs come and go. They start on a project, rewrite whatever they can get their hands on into the "way it should've been" and then fuck off after a year. The devs that stay have to figure out the maintenance story on their own because screw comments and documentation for this new bright and shiny way of doing things.
I don't know if I'm the only one that sees the pattern in our company but God forbid you say anything to bruise the new hire's ego.
This is a fair criticism, but except for the inevitable bugs/regressions introduced by the rewrite, the devs aren't directly affecting the UX (making it worse). More importantly, they're not deliberately sabotaging functionality -- the article's Economist app example -- in their quest for the current hotness.
This is why "it's the PMs" is a refrain -- because the changes they make are very tangible in the end product.
> 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
Backend folks do this too btw. I’ve seen adoption of Docker, Kubernetes, microservice architectures, Rust, etc. driven more by a desire to use the latest trends than the best tool for the job.
Absolutely true. Though when I was looking for a job 5 years ago I had "stale" classic skills and no one wanted to hire me because employers were looking for new skills, cloud etc. Now I make sure my work is new tech rather what is best.
I think you're talking about a few different concerns and not all should be ignored. Resume driven development is something that should be avoided, but there are good reasons to update your tech stack even if the old one is working fine. To your point, I've been to tech workshops for new tech where everyone was laughing about their current jobs' quagmire from previous new tech. All I could think about is not wanting to use either in production for what they were doing. However, I was also at a job pulling teeth trying to convert from SVN to git. A lot of people argued changing was fashionable, but branching and merging were frustrating (therefore not heavily used), tools we wanted to integrate with less often supported SVN, and a lot of the automated processes in place would have been much more lightweight after transitioning.
While I don't think appealing to new hires should drive your tech stack, telling them we still used SVN was something you kind of said under your breath with a bit of shame. As for "nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase" is true, but I think needs some give and take. If you're making someone responsible for something you need to give them some latitude for running it their own way. I'm going to grumble less about dealing with my own mistakes over someone else's, but rewriting everything every time someone quits isn't an option either.
> 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.
> 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.
That's what I've heard too, that most COBOL jobs don't pay that much and have been outsourced.
> 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.
That is how I feel too. In fact I'd prefer working on something that really lasts compared to the latest fad. But the differences in salary make this a difficult choices.
To play devil's advocate on the re-write stuff. That's because new tools are usually significantly better on one or more dimensions and usually not much worse in other dimensions.
That doesn't mean you should actually do it, but as someone who's had more than enough time to get over the new and shine syndrome there's a lot to be gained by migrating as often as needed (ie. the productivity gain from the new outweighs the migration/current support cost in a reasonable timeframe).
Programming tools, techniques and languages are still evolving quickly and even in the same ecosystem I don't use many of the tools and a frameworks I did 5 years ago.
For those who are tired of this culture, you might want to take a look at working on projects targeting poorer countries. There, backward compatibility with older technologies is what is prized, and newer technologies hinder adoption rates.
> The bigger problem is that nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase. Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look good on their resume going into the next job. Some of the most talented developers we hired were obviously only interested in using our company as a stepping stone to FAANG jobs (which didn't actually pay much more, but they were more prestigious on a resume so they wanted to switch).
This isn’t actually the developers’ fault, either. I think we need to blame the tech industry as a whole for this.
Agree. I appreciate this suffers from a No True Scotsman fallacy, but the framing from the OP completely misses the point on what a Product Manager _should_ be doing. There’s a near infinite list of things customers want. From missing features, to bug fixes, minor UI improvements, to whole new products. If people are making change for change sake it’s usually more of a symptom of not doing the work to actually identify what would be impactful and valuable. It’s reaching for what feels easy versus doing the hard work.
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?
You could or not, it's a tradeoff. Not sure what your criteria for "objective" is. In iOS-land you gotta keep up with the changes every year or your app will show its age. You could continue to do this in ObjC year after year but it's increasingly tough to hire ObjC devs, and Swift offers the possibility of a gradual transition rather than a full on rewrite. Not to mention the quality of life improvements.
I am just writing some hardware test app using C++ and wxWidgets.
But in general, yes, you are completely right. It's just virtual signalling between developers. You can't just write something, it has to be Instagram friendly. It needs to be popular and have hundreds of stars in GitHub.
Yes: some companies have employees who don't quit as soon as a new JavaScript framework is launched. Do what they do. Yes, large companies operate by different terms than startups, but I assume (big guess here) there are startups who aren't just angling for acquisition or unicorn-or-bust layoff pits. Note that they may not say they're going in those directions, but they will definitely manage you in those terms.
[In fact, I'd be curious how many <20ppl companies with 80hr/wk soldiers aren't hustling for acquistion or aren't running out of money]
For GP, it seems obvious that they're interviewing the wrong people. It could be their phone screening, it could be their ad, it could be their industry sector. For instance, don't advertise for a Front-end Developer, advertise for a [thing you're actually hiring for] Developer, and screen resumes on this basis regardless of what you put in the ad (which hopefully is accurate as to job responsibilities and necessary skills).
The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it.
The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software.
But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers.
It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore.
I've recently switched from VSCode to Panics Nova, and for a very brief moment I felt like I was back in the old days of Mac Os X where things just worked, and where I felt at home with my OS, without constantly waiting for a better alternative to come along.
Yeah trying to switch from VSCode to Nova was the opposite experience for me.
For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms.
I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.)
There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020.
Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere.
Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.
I can't say this view has it entirely backwards because part of the phenomenon is due to the strengths of the web today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the argument is that native Apple software could, but no longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and Electron.
I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. Here's why:
- I don't feel the Mac's UX is great these days. If my app doesn't benefit from a consistent and elegant GUI, I might as well do it with web tech.
- I can't keep up with Xcode and the OS changing constantly. There was a time when you'd get a couple years between OS upgrades, when Apple's documentation wasn't (entirely) useless
- Desktop software on the Mac involves so much complexity today (eg: sandboxing, certificates, iCloud, icon formats and sizes, etc) that I don't want to deal with it
The Apple ecosystem doesn't offer enough advantages for me anymore to warrant the effort.
Agree. I hate every electron app I use, but even my longtime macOS favorites are beginning to feel only marginally better. They keep spicing up the UI, removing things that used to be reliable constants across applications and hiding more and more things behind ... menus like I'm on a mobile device, revealing or moving UI elements on mouse hover.
Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same were great like ten years ago. You always knew if a dot was in the red close button it meant your work wasn't saved. You could drag and drop the tiny icon just like it was an icon in Finder. It was almost always consistent.
Preview used to be a simple app for viewing documents. I welcomed the addition of annotation tools like adding a signature, but why did they axe the standard titlebar behavior? Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable?
Notes is kind of a new app in my mind so it hit the scene when macOS was already starting to feel more like an iPhone, but it's still worth talking about. They keep making it more powerful, like adding checklists and tables and such, but they hide the most basic functionality, text formatting, under a flyout menu. I really like the iOS feature to scan documents. The cropping and contrast adjustments are so good that I can usually quickly scan several pages of handwritten homework within a couple minutes. However, exporting a scanned PDF out of a document on macOS is a mess. Right click on the scan and it take seconds for a context menu to appear. At first I thought it must be my computer got hung, but it's like this consistently. How did they ship a product that make something as basic as a context menu hang for several seconds?
I could gripe with more examples, but the overarching feel I get is that macOS is being pushed more and more towards feeling like iOS, the emphasis on programs editing files is disappearing, and one day everything will be sandboxed and I'll have to click through "share" menus to transfer data from one app to another, provided those apps are kind enough to let me import or export.
> Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable?
This appears to be the standard behaviour of document windows now. It also occurs in the title bar of Finder windows, for example. It is excruciating.
Worse: if you try to rename a file by clicking the drop-down chevron, typing into the Name box, and pressing Return, there will be no effect and the name you entered will be lost. Yes: they broke rename in every standard application! The only method I've found that works is to resist my natural urge to hit Return and press Tab instead.
I agree with the sentiment that macOS UI is on a severe decline. Here’s one bit of possible comfort for you. Get the proxy icon back without having to hover over window titles:
I generally agree. MacOS appears to be stagnating in its capabilities, even if there is a constant churn of UI and features. The Human Interface Guidelines-based approach of old seems to have been blurred thanks to the iOS mashups we are now seeing, and native apps that used to feel substantially better aren't really better enough anymore.
However, for me the big issue with Electron or other web-tech apps is the performance - they all feel incredibly slow and laggy, engorge themselves on my machine's resources, and generally slow down substantially the longer they have been open.
Considering my main gripe about macOS when compared to say, Windows, has been the general performance of the UI and apps, this isn't a particularly welcome phenomenon.
Huge agreement to keeping up with the iOS and arbitrary app update requirements. My personal projects are in a place that releasing even minor updates is an endeavor I just don't have time for anymore.
Why did Electron kill it? And don't say size, because people gladly install 0.5TB games at the drop of a hat.
ElectronJS is brilliant, it just needs to go on a diet. It truly is write-once-run-everywhere, which makes my life worlds easier as a dev supporting three OSes.
But it doesn't make your GUI pretty: you still need a designer. And because of that, I miss native GUIs where the design is consistent.
I would ding Electron because it facilitates a diaspora of GUI design when we actually need consistency.
Apple seems to have driven the cost of all (mobile) software to 99c or free, roughly. How can anyone really make any money just making something solid and usable without turning it into a "service" or something at that price? And I as a user don't want any of that stuff because I don't want a service to lock me in, I want to pay up front for something good and leave it at that.
Pro/power user apps still cost a bit. Apps like Procreate and Luma sell for >$10 and seem to have great sales. I guess the issue comes when you have sold your app to almost everyone who is willing to buy it and then you are unable to make any more sales which forces you to either go to subscription model or to create a new listing "Procreate 2" to charge everyone again. Both of these options make people pretty upset though.
There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS.
In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.
I’m just curious because I’m not a heavy mobile app user. The only apps on my phone right now that I feel really good are free. I paid for many apps but most haven’t been updated in years and have a lot to improve. Where are the good apps?
Procreate, Concepts, and fusion are the ones that come to mind. There are probably very few paid apps people buy for purely content consumption outside of games. But for content creators there is a fairly wide selection of pro apps that are pretty good.
Luma fussion just updated to allow you to video edit directly from an external SSD without having to import/export to local storage.
Most of the developers you mentioned are still around and still cranking. Panic and Rogue Amoeba in particular. Others have emerged, though there's a lot of crossover with iOS these days, since people want their data available across their devices. Bear and Things come to mind; Dash by Kapeli; The Archive; Kaleidoscope has been reinvigorated by a company that seems to know what they're doing; Alfred; Paw, Proxie, and Proxyman... they are out there.
> The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it.
Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.
Wow thank you for that list of developers. I looked through all of them and found some great apps.
Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.
Other companies: Omni Group (mentioned elsewhere), Bare Bones Software. There's also this page [0] which has a few names -- some unfortunately which don't exist anymore (Ambrosia! sigh)
This has nothing to do with anything Apple has done other than expand from serving a niche of self-identified tasteful customers into serving half the planet.
It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.
For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.
Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features.
Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.
It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life, honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would expect from the same software written natively.
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.
Yes, perhaps we're alone in this thread but with 14 million users (out of an estimated 24 million) world wide we're probably in the majority.
Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.
For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too long is a recipe for kernel panic.
I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day.
Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.
I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache at the last moment, just in case it would be used before then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache to allow a different program to use the memory. If the single program is the OS, great. If there's a single large program using RAM such as a browser, then it's still workable but not so great. If you have more than one program each trying to eat 80% of the RAM available, then you're in a world of hurt.
And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and only important program running on the computer, which is how we get into the situation we're in.
IM applications are the worst offenders --- they are often left in the background and only for notification purposes, yet we somehow end up with monstrosities like Slack and Teams which use more RAM when idle than an entire computer a decade ago.
Why can't it be both? Microsoft has been doing great things recently, with VSCode, Typescript, C#. Of course maybe it's the first step of EEE. I'm personally worried about the VSCode/developing in containers that's closed source/Github/NPM acquisition, that sounds like they're preparing some kind of best of class developing experience (probably linked with Azure too) that will be proprieteray. But for now they remain well behaved, and everything until now is open source.
When I jumped into Apple in the early 2000's, there was amazing software. I recall in particular my first Intel-Mac-laptop. There was this amazing program that changed the GUI to look like the Bjork video "All is Full of Love". It was absolute magic (beyond the random crashes of the first Intel macs which SUCKED).
I think the problem with all app-stores is this:
1. There's lots of very low quality software.
2. There's no way to verify the software does what it says it does before purchasing.
I can't tell you how many times I've bought an app for my daughter--even from "reputable" companies that only has a few minutes of content before it starts begging for money, coins etc.
Or even if the game didn't beg for money, it was just nonsense. I bought my daughter a game that had no pay mechanics-- but, you had to earn "coins" to do impossible challenges to get prizes. I ended up playing most of the game for her because it was just too hard for a kid, and it was just too hard for an adult who cut his teeth on Atari and Nintendo. It wasn't fun, just tedious. The game required you to make 300ish correct decisions with about one second each in-between them.
In the old days, I was happy to drop 25$ on an interesting app.
I'd love to check out Panics Nova but the Apple Ecosystem isn't viable for me anymore. :-/
>But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers.
Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...
Panic for years is rather open how they can't operate profitable on iOS and as a result discontinued many of their great iOS apps. The fear is that the Mac app market goes the same way like the iOS App Store.
Also wasn't Omni laying people off recently. I suspect all these companies are struggling.
It's interesting that Apple struggled for a long time with 3rd party software. Developers weren't interested because the volumes were too small. Now it's almost the opposite, there are plenty of customers but the market is awash with cheap or free options.
>The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it.
It's not just Apple, this has been a general trend for several decades. In the nineties I paid for Office (about £400 I think), now I use Google Docs. It was the same for development tools, £1800 for an MSDN subscription, now I use VS Community, git and open source components.
I suspect this is inevitable because the marginal cost of software is so low.
> The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over.
Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat, I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple without considering the decisions these companies made for themselves.
Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and still expecting to succeed as a business.
how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.
i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server)
it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and smooth for the most part
my only concerns are
1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins)
2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels" different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something i notice
3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting, dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little heavy for that (in the ui sense)
4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to fix, duplicate errors reported etc)
---
its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it could!
It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore.
It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising.
Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is.
You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK.
There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization.
In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives.
But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.
> when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers.
What the fuck, it’s your decision to charge $1 because thousands of other devs do it, not Apple’s. If you want to charge $10-$50 and you think can convince users to pay that much, Apple is not stopping you. Seriously wtf.
Apple’s ecosystem got those hundreds of millions of customers in the first place because Apple lets the users decide how much they think apps should be worth.
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 could roll back to the not-shitty version on my
Mac but every time I pull out my phone it takes multiple seconds to load, then multiple seconds to leave the “Home” screen to search through my notes, or for the editor to be ready to use to write a new note.
I still haven’t found a replacement and I really need to. (Requirements, before you suggest your favorite note app: needs Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients; must not be a goddamn web view crammed awkwardly into an app; needs to let me access local copies of my notes when the internet is down; needs to let me share some notes with my husband. “Actually having a nice UI for handling sync conflicts” would be nice too, EN always did the bare minimum of “now you have two copies with a note about sync conflicts on one of them”.) Right now I am kind of thinking of spending a week trying to press Scrivener plus an external sync service (Dropbox, etc) into service, since their clients are all Very Native, and one of the things we actually use EN for is a writing project...
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 notes!
(I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases that most of their testing fails to cover)
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.
> I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line
From what I see around me, though, most people just do not have any digital organizing skills whatsoever. It's honestly exceptional that I meet someone who has files going back more than five years and those files are not on their desktop in a "previous computer" directory; and even that category of people includes only those with tech friends that helped them move the data over and set the new system up.
I don't disagree with you, but we might just be the minority.
I agree with GP, and I'll pat myself on the back for having pretty damn well organize data going back over ten years, which has come with me over four computers. I still want powerful search on top of that, but I'm usually much more efficient at locating my own data than Spotlight is. Back when I had an MP3 collection, it was the same. I had a well-organized folder structure and it felt easier manage than Spotify.
I recognize that us power users are a minority, but I really wish there was a shop out there that would build software for us instead of everyone converging towards "user-friendly."
I have my notes in one large disorganised plain text file. Sublime text searches it exhaustively in a fraction of a second. Works quite well though syncing across devices is still an issue
Yeah, I've noticed that searching my Gmail account on iPhone will often fail to find messages entirely even when I know the exact phrase in the email or the sender.
You might try Obsidian. I think it checks all of those boxes except “web view”: it’s an Electron app, but like VS Code it shows that web tech doesn’t have to be slow (it just nearly always is). They just shipped the native client and it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good.
On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming.
Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete.
I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote account just to see how things are going. I want them to succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be offset by new users.
I don't want new features. I do want cross platform, native apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I've yet to find a good solution that "just works".
I just came to this thread and searched for Evernote specifically to upvote or add this. Evernote evolved from a perfect extension of my private memory available rapidly and anywhere I needed it into a bloated collaboration suite. I would be surprised if any customer asked for it. I canceled the service but will gladly pay twice as much for an Evernote Classic that gets back to basics and does those well.
Well the "collaboration suite" features are now slowly being phased out or at least dont receive that much attention. Their new calendar integration and task management features are small steps but I think they are intriguing at least.
I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to compromises for which a native UX would have been superior. Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind. Sure it’s a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the fussy platform shims aren’t needed.
> I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated.
I don't.
Event loops, for example, work completely differently on macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. You will abstract across them eventually and you will get that abstraction wrong unless you are a programming god--at which point you might as well just use a cross-platform system to start.
The cross-platform guys have big companies with lots of money and programmers solving problems that you haven't even dreamed of. If you're releasing on multiple platforms, you will not win.
I guess you need to decide what indicator are you trying to optimize: user experience vs cost effectiveness. Evernote's CEO decided for the latter and I believe he's right betting the company on the Electron based clients. This is also understandably infuriating existing users as they lose the biggest feature that was the native feeling of EN. Other features are being slowly added along with some new ones that are arguably useful, but snappiness will not come back.
My point of view is if you can't deliver new features you become the incumbent and new player will replicate those features with lower cost or better execution. Also, the ball is moving: newer apps are heavy on features like backlinking that could not be delivered with the glacial release cycles of the "good old Evernote".
I understand that EN is still the best on being the ultimate digital repository, but as a "digital brain" the market has slightly moved towards the PKM space (see Obsidian, Notion, and so on).
I would add that Joplin is great because it's plain text. People keep trying to shove OneNote at us at work and all I want is one text box per note, that doesn't move around when I try to edit it.
Looks like a piece of Electron webshit, which I am loathe to touch, but on the other hand IT HAS A DIFF VIEW PLUGIN TO HELP WITH CONFLICTING CHANGES OMFG :)
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.
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.
It's because each of those apps is actually a web page running inside its personal instance of Google Chrome. And Chrome looooves creating tens of processes.
Second OneNote. I switched to it back when they broke Evernote. It does not do everything as well as the old Evernote, but it is STABLE. Very few new features in the past 10 years, and that is a GOOD thing.
Is there a way to get rid of that thing where you have to manually drag out text boxes to type in? I really hated that, if I want freeform page layout I’ll use an actual notebook or Illustrator.
I don't think there's any way to turn it off but I'm like you. I only ever use the default text area and never place free-form. So I just ignore the feature :)
I've been giving Ulysses a try lately and so far I'm pretty impressed. I've written about 4000 words with it so far and I'm reasonably happy. The only complaint I have so far is that the Revision and Dashboard buttons on the top right corner are supremely confusing with how they toggle the right sidebar. Oh, and it's a subscription app. I feel really weird about paying monthly to use a text editor that can very well work without any server-side component. I may not continue after the trial because of that.
I never had any issue with Scriviner syncing between my windows machine and my iPhone using Dropbox. Took like 5 minutes to finagle into working. The setup instructions were top result on Google when I did it a while back. You should be aware though that merge conflicts were handled exactly how you said you didn’t want. You get a conflict folder with the date on it and a second copy of the document in it. It’s up to you to decide if the conflict version or the main document version is the right one.
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?
I can't think of a better example of this than JIRA. I remember installing it on-prem about twenty years ago. Pretty simple, easy to get around, pretty quick. Now, it is a towering behemoth of feature and I dread using it.
For example, when you load the kanban view, when you re-focus the window, the tasks jump and bounce around, even if there's no change. I think that when the window gets focused, the front-end requests the latest data and then repaints it. Why repaint if the data has not changed?
Another example is links. We add a lot of links in our tickets, and I'm always frustrated at how difficult it is to interact with them. When an issue page loads, it kicks off these async things which fetch the link data, and eventually renders them into some kind of first-class link div. The problem is that if you click on the link before the async call finishes and updates the link element, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. If the link does work, and you control click it, it will sometimes not open in a new tab, but instead in the current window. Which means that when you go Back,you have to wait again for the link to render.
I respect that a lot of people are big JIRA fans, but I can't help but wonder if my experience is unique, or if nobody at Atlassian really uses it in anger.
There'll never be a time I won't be up for a bit of Jira-bashing! Can't stand the bloody software, chiefly because it's an unstable mess of a product that perfectly recreates the soupy grottiness of a hangover every time you use it.
Those who purchase JIRA don't use it. Those who are stuck using don't make the purchasing decision. That lock in against your will really fuels that fire of hate.
Atlassian are the current, unchallenged, world beating champions of S L O W and have been for a long time. But the purchasers don't care they don't have to use the crud.
>>As for iPhoto, I never used it much, but my eighty-something mother did, and took lots of great photos with the Sony RX100 I gave her when I gave up on pocket cams. She’s not geeky but has a Bachelor’s in the sciences and is really smart. At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn’t take pictures much any more. I miss them.
Literally the exact same thing happened with my mother and Google's own Picassa. It was fantastic application to easily manage your photos collection, until one day google just went...nah? The app itself still works, but a lot of the functionality is just broken, and without the google photos integration working anymore my mum lost the easy to use way of sharing the photos she takes. And the actual google photos interface is horrendous, I'm willing to bet that it's constantly being redesigned so that someone at google can justify a raise/promotion, not because there's any actual reason to keep redesigning the whole thing periodically, other than someone's career progression.
Just to add another viewpoint, I think Google photos is their best product, and my grandparents both are able to use it without issue. They haven't even contacted me about it.
I wish they still did unlimited storage, but the app is quality, with some pretty smart search built in (you can search things like "sunset" with great accuracy). The editor is pretty easy to use as well.
I love Google Photos. Especially the AI search! So great.
The only thing is I wish it had the smart photo off-loading of iOS Photos. I don't want to delete all synched pictures from my phone, only the least recent ones. So I can still send the new ones to family without re-downloading. Why cannot I do that? iOS Photos can do that.
It’s happening to me now. My family has thousands of photos, and both the Apple and Google offerings make the process of dealing with them more complex than needed. Sharing photos is pretty unintuitive as well.
That's the reason I disable auto updates for all apps on my phone. Only recently I had to update Uber because it refused to work otherwise and sure enough: the new version is a bloated slow pile of garbage.
I think another thing that affects this is staff churn.
It's common for PMs and product designers to move company after about 3 years.
Many of the apps I use have been around for more than a decade now.
That means I've likely been using them for significantly longer than the people who are making design decisions about them!
Changes that are "obviously bad" to me - based on my very specific patterns of using the app over a ten year period - may not be at all intuitively bad to the team working on it.
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 products are designed around a vague concept of "engagement" which is all about getting users to interact with the app as much as possible. While this is the natural end state for ad-driven companies, I find it very frustrating that a subscription-based service like Spotify feels the need to take as much control away from the user as possible.
I personally believe many of these metrics are negative indicators of UX quality. Session length, pages viewed, number of clicks could very well mean that users aren't finding / getting what they want from your app.
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 perfect according to their whims.
This never seems to happen with software though. When Facebook does a massive redesign they (eventually) force it on everyone. Likewise the new iOS or any software update as mentioned in article. It’s always in this quest to find one perfect version, rather than accepting that there is no perfect version for everyone and you have to give different users choices, or at least options!
They can actually afford building several versions: one for revular joe user, and one highly customisable power users. They can even allow (gasp) plugins!
I mean, Winamp had skins and plugins more than 20 years ago. Surely it isn't some hopelessly lost skill, like making the roman concrete or the greek fire?!
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.
I can't believe that I never realized having multiple parallel versions is even an option. Perhaps four sounds like a lot to maintain, especially multiplied by a number of OSes or if it's a complex software with many features, but more than one is definitely not a crazy proposal.
>It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions and different people would find each perfect according to their whims.
I would fine tune that conclusion a bit: it's not that everybody each had their own different individual preference particular to them. It's that there really were specific, objective answers and that it wasn't specific to the individuality of each and every person. But the "right" answer wasn't one but three or four different right answers. But importantly, there weren't Zero right answers, and there weren't infinity. There were three or four.
Yup, a company doesn't want to develop more products than it needs to, so they instead try to stuff all the market needs into a singular product, which results in a compromised product for every customer. I'm constantly complaining to my product management at work about this fact, it isn't that they don't know it, it is just that company management would never approve the resources for the 2-4 products that actually need to get made.
Telegram does this. They have many clients written by independent teams focusing on slightly different parts. All apps are fast and pleasing to use. But you may like some one app better than others and you can just use that one.
Back in the skeuomorphism era, Twitter offered an awesome and innovative iPad app (version 4.x) that had a UX design based on three overlapping layers with navigation tabs on the side. One could effortlessly switch between your own timeline, another user's timeline and a series of tweet threads. With the amount of visual elments on screen it was very information dense and easy to follow. I had just bought a retina Gen3 iPad and instantly fell in love with the experience.
The next major version update was a huge disappointment as they decided to take away all the good and unique things out of the app and make it just another clone of their mobile web interface which just looked barren on the iPad screen. Fortunately I had a backup of the old version which I was able to restore but still had a sour taste in my mouth knowing this version might stop working any day from then.
I did try other 3rd party clients but none was as good as the good old official one. The same design was copied by Weibo for their iPad app which held out a bit longer but eventually it went the same way Twitter had.
I believe the iPad app was so damn good because it was an app called Tweetie that they bought. That was a real shame when it went away in favor of the lowest common denominator.
What's best for the 7 billion is bound to be different to what's best for a few power users. It makes sense for them to be different apps, perhaps provided by 3rd parties if Twitter won't do them all.
I find these "7 billion" apps are often effortlessly smooth for basic tasks that I don't want to spend mental effort on. They seem to know what I want to do and make that just about the only option.
The problem I find is that when apps are created for the common-denominator, they alienate the power users that usually create the content that the rest consume.
The Twitter app for example, is perfectly ok for me as a lurker/consumer -- but is most often criticised by the people who i follow (and who are active tweeters)
But you can just use the another one if you're in that special minority, can't you? I've heard of Tweetdeck being a Twitter application used by content creator type Twitter users.
I remember hearing a talk by Bill Gates a long time ago where he said the biggest competitor for Word was previous versions of the program. That is no longer true with forced updates. Granted, there are many reasons why it is not practical these days for old versions to be a competitor, but that would be a good message to companies that some of their new "innovations" may not have been a good idea.
I think this is one of the biggest issues with SaaS. I appreciate that a stable revenue source is necessary for ongoing development, but UX decisions are much harder to evaluate. If I purchase a desktop application and opt not to upgrade, that's useful data to have. If you jam a UX update down my throat and I don't cancel my subscription, that doesn't mean you made a fantastic UX decision. It generally means the cost of changing is too expensive or, more likely, you've locked my data up in a format not easily exportable.
I think it'd be nice if our tooling made it easier to support multiple "versions" of a deployed application. As it stands, it's far too expensive and error-prone to let customers opt into UI upgrades. As a product consumer, I can't stand continuous deployment. It just means my workflow can break at any time.
Competition forces you to make a good product or die and be replaced by a company that does. When previous versions were a source of competition, it was likely easier for companies to notice their mistakes and correct them. With SaaS, a company can coast along on brand recognition for awhile, slowly become zombified, until one day all of your customers switch to an up-and-coming competitor.
This is also sort of baked into human nature. We adapt to things, the flip side of which is taking them for granted. That makes it easier to justify "improvements." Human beings are not good at leaving things alone.
This kind of thinking is every where. There is a reason politicians announce grand projects and cut ribbons in full public few (never mind these projects exceed budget and timeline multiple times) instead of fixing existing failing infrastructure.
Here is where OSS could really shine - make clones of old programs and give them modern features while keeping the old-school, actually-working interfaces. Rather than cloning the current (or near-current) iteration of Office, make a file-compatible version that's a snap to use and avoids as much interface fluff as possible. Applications are for work, and should facilitate work.
Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and no, AbiWord is nowhere near that), a WP 5.1 clone, a XyWrite that knows OpenType, a dBase-style interface (definitely not a clone) for a modern, free database system. Those older programs simply worked, had command systems that could be explored and learned (shoot, before the Ribbon even Office could be sussed out through experimentation), and were about work. As much as I appreciate what I can do, capability-wise, with modern systems, the people who design them don't seem to be the people who use them.
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.
I'll admit I haven't used in a long time. It's definitely been improving for a long time, but my recollection of it has always been as being somewhat messy.
Compare, say, to Affinity, Pixelmator, Procreate...
I keep trying to adopt this workflow and it ends in disaster. For example: Yesterday I installed a clean copy of the latest release of Ubuntu. Lets ignore the numerous annoyances that are unpolished such as the mouse tracking or the OS filled with apps that are worse than its Windows/Mac counterparts. No one seems to want to produce a cohesive OS + apps anyway.
The one thing that is absolutely unforgivable is an app that you expect to trust instead ends up failing you.
My example: After installing I needed to compress a folder of important code and pictures. Just use Archiver right? Well I compressed the folder into a zip file. Something seemed strange. Ubuntu's file manager was reporting 0 bytes for the file after compressing. Strange, so I copied it to another folder. OK 8.5MB. Maybe the file manager was just not able to automatically refresh. The file size seemed small given the input was 300MB. Me being a little worried after seeing this and having been burned in the past, I opened the file and attempted to decompress. First, I was able to see the files so I could have stopped there thinking the file is fine but I continued and clicked extract. It failed. Turns out the file was corrupted.
Imagine if I had not done this sanity check and 6 months later I go to uncompress and the archive is corrupted. That is a potential anxiety attack.
This is not a joke, if you cannot ever trust the damn system to do basic things, you will constantly feel like you are walking on thin ice. Its 2021 how is this still an issue? When you go to complain you are treated with an uncaring groups or more likely an actively hostile group of people.
I have been going back and forth from Linux(various distros) for 15 years now. Not once have I ever felt that I could fully trust my system. The people who develop this stuff don't seem to care about basic quality. If it works for them, ship it. I don't know how to solve this problem without a financial incentive. There are no consequences to shipping regressions and thus even though the software is free as in freedom the incentives are not really aligned with many users.
Maybe I need to sit down and read through as much of the code of the OS and associated apps as possible and set specific version that I "FREEZE" on that are good known versions. But then I will not be able to get any help when something does break since im on old versions and typically googling issues returns fixes for the latest version...so now I would be left with fixing the code myself.
Swiping gestures/actions are actually a very natural affordance in mobile "touch" interfaces. They're based on the Accot-Zhai steering law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accot-Zhai_steering_law a natural extension of Fitt's law that was developed as early as the 1990s.
A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as regards their UI, with the usual set of UI widgets such as text boxes, dropdown lists, radio boxes, buttons, etc. These widgets are available in any toolkit or browser in highly polished and performant implementations that require very little from the developer in terms of fiddling with the UI.
So it completely boggles the mind that, during the last decade, we are witnessing an unbelievable onslaught to any sane UI convention that people have come to expect. At the top of my head:
- No accessibility at all, even though there are extensive sets of standards fully implemented by the UI toolkit.
- No scrollbars at all. Even worse, scrollbars that don't behave quite right.
- Ugly styling that doesn't follow even the most basic modicum of guidelines crystalized around the 80s.
- Text boxes and other widgets that have hidden weird behaviours, or are generally ridiculously slow.
- UI widgets that are badly sized and don't correctly follow the regular zoom controls.
- Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area.
- Trivial apps for which the browser has to download megabytes of js and raise the CPU to a point that the fans need to start spinning.
- Cryptic icons that don't have any semantic connection with what they are supposed to accomplish.
- My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it.
- Phone button menus that have an unknown size below the bottom of the screen and there is no visible clue how many icons below the bottom are not visible.
We are possibly very near hitting rock bottom in terms of UI in 2021, which (oddly enough) means that there is bound to be a renaissance of some sort as regards those things. After the middle ages many turned to the classical antiquity for inspiration. Drooling over the skeuomorphic UIs of the original iPhone and the pseudo-3d toolkits of the 1990s...
> My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it.
This is absolutely the worst thing that interfaces do. It’s terrible, I hate it so much.
This article sounds rather ‘truthy’. On HN, you’re always getting to get some upvotes for saying “technology used to be so much better, amirite?! Bloody product managers ruining everything!”.
But it’s harder than that. Apps need to keep up to date with operating systems, technology changes, business changes.
Take The Economist mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in cancellations, so the change was designed to stem that. They have data you don’t.
Similarly, iMovie. I agree, I preferred the old version. But my wife, who had never used it until last year, got on fine with the new one.
>Apps need to keep up to date with operating systems, technology changes, business changes. Take The Economist mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in cancellations, so the change was designed to stem that. They have data you don’t.
All of the above are still examples of product managers runing everything.
In The Economist case, the app update is making me seriously consider cancelling. UI can be subjective... but what's not is the unresponsiveness and lack of reliability in the audio playback. It's not acceptible for these to degrade with new releases.
> I preferred the old version. But my wife, who had never used it until last year, got on fine with the new one.
This could be one of those things where you don't know it can be better until you see it.
Things like - faster computer, more comfortable car, better mattress (for you). Sometimes you live fine until the glass shatters and the old one will never be the same.
Edit: this sounds very consumer-y, it's just the examples that pop in to my head. It can be better bosses, more competent plumber, whatever.
It could be, I agree. A bit like the "Flub programmer" paradox - you don't know something would be better for you because you don't know it exists.
On the other hand, it could also be that some people prefer the old way because they've got used to it. Any change to is uncomfortable for them simply because it's different. Every time Facebook has updated its timeline, my sister complains saying "the current one is perfect", forgetting that she'd previously said it was so bad she was closing her account.
To what extent it's one rather than the other is extremely subjective. If Facebook had not updated its UI (and the apps mentioned by the OP had not changed theirs), then they may well have gone out of business. Always saying "the old version was better" is just a form of nostalgia, a sentimental view on which most corporations in a modern capitalist economy cannot thrive.
This seems like it happens with physical products too more and more. I may be reading too much into it, but it often feels like this is done (with products and software) to soften you up with the aim of shifting things subtly in favour of the producer:
- make it less something you settle with longer-term and more something that's basically roughly the same axe but differs on a pretty short timeframe
- use the changes to probe what people care about to a greater / less extent
- take away as much that the average person doesn't care about enough to get really annoyed about (which is fine if it's cheaper/better for the consumer but often it's more about hiding the change in the blizzard of activity so you don't get it cheaper or notice the cuts that save the producer without passing it on).
In software the one that was eternally annoying everyone I worked with was WebEx - initially a product that was great in my firm but eventually became the reason no one could start meetings on time because you couldn't rely on it launching in a timely manner because there'd be some idiotic update. It carried on until we ditched it abruptly - great move PM :)
Anyway, it's annoying but at least it's not as bad as the other modern trend: wilfully messing things up for you, so they can charge you to have the non-messed up version back (eg airline seats being broken up on purpose for no good reason! Unless you pay a fee for them not to be a total pain!)
I'm not particularly thrilled by "hybrid" apps, or cross-platform framework apps. Never have been (cross-platform frameworks have been around for decades, and hybrid apps have been around, almost as long as smartphones have).
Great sales pitch: "Fire all your expensive, experienced native developers, and hire cheap JavaScript programmers right out of bootcamps, that write everything on the server, so the native app is really just a WebView!".
"Write once, deploy everywhere." Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah...they said that about C. They they said it about Java. They said that about X11/Motif. They said that about Qt. They said that about React Native. Now, they are saying it about Web apps.
Don't get me wrong. There are some applications that I think hybrid or PWAs are the way to go. If someone asks me, and the use case they describe fits my vision for that, I will recommend they explore hybrid/PWA/WebP/Whatever. I recently pulled several native apps off the App Store, because I thought another developer had a better solution, using Ionic.
It's just that native will always give a richer user experience than any kind of abstracted framework. If delivering the best UX is important, we still need to go native (which is generally delivered via built-in frameworks, anyway).
My wife asks me why this happens all the time. This is the way better answer that I usually give her: “money.” So I’ll be passing along this blog post to her.
There are many apps that get worse over the years. I literally don’t know how to use most apps these days and I don’t care to. On an app we use for work, I went irate that a button I used often mysteriously disappeared. A few months later, I was having a beer with one of the devs that works on it and it came up. He laughed and said that 40% of users had the same reaction I did. It was less than 50% so they shipped the change. :sigh:
The good thing about data-driven management is, they have the figures!
Meanwhile in the growth-hacking section, they’ll raise an project proving that they could get 40% more users if they had a single specific button, if only these were not the users we betrayed in the first place.
I can only comment on The Economist App, the experience has indeed worsened over time. Simple features like searching an article, bookmarking it going back to where you left off etc.
Similar behavior I feel among other apps as well.
- New features aren't that useful. (bells and whistles because everyone has it, so should we)
- Old features aren't maintained or getting worse with each release
- Apps seem to be getting slower.
- They don't seem to be completely native (probably using incorrect terminology). When you minimize an app and go back to it, it'll refresh the page. You were reading something?, thought you found an interesting product and paused to look up something?
I don't mind paying a subscription either. If I'm using an app regularly, it needs to be maintained over OS versions but so many apps are getting worse.
While not letting PMs off the hook - I think “PM culture” is a cancer on the tech industry, and companies have ceded far too much influence to them overall - I think the issue is something else. The way I’ve described it is: the goal of many apps, services and sites now is to get you to spend as much time as possible in/on them, not to make you happy while doing so. They’ve learned that FOMO increases engagement. That the more time a user spends fumbling around for what they want, the more time they hold your attention. That user re-education means more time, more attention, more eyeballs.
We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless, because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it, while the metrics faction has reams of “data” to back then up. A thousand times a day we’re subjected to things we don’t want to experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use software is just one facet of it.
I agree with Tim's conclusion but not about PMs. In my group at Apple, the PMs had no influence on feature selection. Their job was to get engineering estimates and monitor progress. The new features came from engineers and designers, and filtered up the chain to division directors who then usually approved or disapproved them. My feeling is that part the problem is a kind of organizational inertia: what do you do with all your engineers when your builds are now all done prior to release, and the only bugs that will be worked on are ones that would stop shipment of the pending release? The answer was to get us all to propose new features for the next release. So everyone gets caught in this propose/design/release cycle that just has no end.
These last three hours I was fighting with a health app which is supposed to be the software counterpoint of a Bluetooth weight scale.
It simply did not work. And the reviews on Google Play were 1 star reviews, because the app simply stopped working.
I wasn't using this app for years, since I've written a Python script to read out the scale via a Raspberry Pi, but I wanted to change some weight thresholds in the scale, which my script didn't support, so I installed the app, after two years of not using it.
I think this app messed up the scale. It connected once, then never again. I even installed versions from 2 years ago, assuming that at least that would work. It didn't. I've tried this with 3 different phones. Pixel, Motorola, Xiaomi. No success. I've rebooted the phones several times.
So I searched for the Bluetooth codes which were responsible for setting these thresholds in the scale, and added them to the script. The script worked fine and did set the new values.
But now I have the issue that the Raspberry Pi often fails at connecting to the scale. It's annoying, but at least the scale has a buffer for several measurements, and once it can connect, it downloads all the measurements.
For others this simply means to throw away the scale or use it offline. Granted, it was a cheap one at around 15 €, but that's no reason to break things.
I own an ancient glass one that was just digital. The display stopped working at one point for no bloody reason.
So, eventually I gutted its controller/display and replaced it with arduino, HD44780-based display, and HX711 mass sensor module (that reads the existing four sensors), with any form of wireless module for communication being easily addable, if needed.
Now, it's 1-gram precise, which is enough to be used as a large kitchen scale if need be (I plan on adding a switch), I've added supports customized calibration, and customized averaging (it takes N measurements, and displays that).
Further, I plan a smart home integration, and will replace the display and functionality with smartphone app with current user selection (presets + guest), logging, etc. (and subtraction of the phone's weight from the total).
It never supported those "fancy" additional measurements as water and/or fat percentage, but I guess those are relatively easily addable as well (aluminium/copper tape as sensors?). With this, formulas used for calculations would be the greater challenge.
Really, this is the only option of 100% future proofing ones hardware - do it yourself... plus, it is saved from a landfill.
> ...in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product.
The AWS recipe is easy though: add another service instead of touching the old one too much. Great now there are 200 services and approaching them is like learning C++. If one considers "the product" to be the entire offering of cloud services - I'd argue that the PMs fell in exactly the same feature trap.
Indeed. The UX is so awful that I avoid AWS for more reasons than simply because it's Amazon's. The next sentence also has me scratching my head:
> I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook.
Has this person used the Amazon website? The UI looks much older than AWS. Which I don't mind, don't get me wrong, but it just surprises me for such a popular website, it really looks like the owners stopped updating it in the late 90s (and the search function works like something from the pre-google era as well). Amazon's shopping site is the last one I visit when I'm desperate and can't find it on normal sites, it's always a fun ride of page after page of "this is not what I looked for" and "even if your price field is a string this sort function should work better". No, it's not the geeks that let you not update the UX I think.
I just started reading a Kindle ebook on my phone and on a Kindle device. The process of switching from one to the other used to be that you open the one, read your location number in the book, and jump to that location in the other.
At some point Amazon introduced "real page numbers" for their ebooks. Those are supplemental numbers intended to synch up with the page numbering of physical books. You could display your "page number" instead of your location number.
Recently, the option to display your location number was removed in the Android application. So here's where things stand:
- Going from Kindle to phone, you open the book on the phone and go through an unnecessarily long sequence of button presses until you finally reach the "go to" command. This is already a significant step backwards in usability compared to the UI of the Kindle Keyboard from 2010. But once you're there, you can enter in your location number and jump to it.
- Going from phone to Kindle, you open the book on the Kindle and go through, yes, an unnecessarily long sequence of button presses. Once you finally reach the "go to" command, you are presented with the option to jump to a page number or a location number. But the page number option is grayed out, so you have to enter a location number. But the phone app won't display a location number -- it wants you to view your physical page number instead. As far as the phone is concerned, you shouldn't be allowed to view your location number even if you want to.
- The Kindle is similarly opinionated. It displays the option to view page numbers instead of location numbers. But, much like in the "go to" command, that option is grayed out. This is technically a step up from the phone app, where the option to view location numbers doesn't even exist. But it's not much of a step up.
- There is a workaround, for now, in that the phone app will display your location number in the "go to" command's popup dialogue. I assume someone is at work as we speak hunting this down so they can remove the information from the dialogue.
- Amazon's customer service people aren't familiar with their own products. They struggle to understand the concept of "I want to display location numbers in the phone app". One of them unilaterally disconnected from chat.
Err, no, the process for switching from one to the other is that they sync last page read automatically. You shouldn't be doing anything.
It works auto-magically for me all the time. I read a lot of books, and I often switch between my Kindle and my phone several times a book.
Maybe you don't have your Kindle connect to your network or whatever, but the reason you're struggling is because you're following the less trodden path.
It works for books I've uploaded to Kindle too, though I always use the upload service via email, precisely because then it's available on both devices.
I'm glad they're getting rid of the location numbering, it's super confusing. I haven't looked into it but it sounds like they're making a genuine improvement to page numbering, but with growing pains.
You're going through a bit of pain while they transition because you use it in a weird way.
> I'm glad they're getting rid of the location numbering, it's super confusing.
In that...?
Locations start at 1 and increase from there. Page numbers are a disaster. In the book I discuss above, page numbers start at 1 alongside "page 1" of the book. There is plenty of material earlier than that, which doesn't have page numbers. It only has location numbers.
The pages of a physical book are larger than a phone screen. So several pages worth of the ebook all have the same page number, which prevents you from jumping to later pages by using the page numbering.
Jumping restrictions are even added in where they aren't needed -- in some books, jumping to location numbers doesn't work. Instead, you jump to a location that is determined by the app as being "near" the location you specified. This has the effect of preventing you from getting all of a particular passage on the screen at the same time, which I want for screenshots.
So no, there's no improvement to numbering going on, just a steady removal of functionality that used to work.
I've had a kindle for years, though it was idle for about the last two... Recently brought it back to life, read a few pages then tried to continue reading on my phone (which I had never used before). First thing it did was take me to the wrong page. I suspect things aren't as perfect as you think they are, and the parent comment has faced issues just as I have. Denial of possible issues is the same as release notes which say "we fixed all the bugs".
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 do the same with Spotify or with one of those terrible news websites.
Some examples of this already exist: Nitter (shows Twitter contents), Invido.us (shows Youtube contents) but they are not mainstream and not particularly polished.
Also, I'm aware that this concept when applied to news websites results in something that is terribly close to an RSS reader.
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?
I think these hypothetical apps should be based on html embeds. The big tech companies are not going to remove the ability to do web embeds of their posts/videos/tweets, because embeds are good for bringing traffic in.
With those services that don't have RSS (Youtube does), you will still need a little scraping just to discover the URL of new tweets/posts in a given channel. But it would be just basic scraping and probably more manageable compared to something like youtube-dl.
"Not mainstream" is key here. Once those become mainstream, they get shut down by the provider of the original service.
The original provider wants to make money off this, so they use the UI to provide you with ads and a bunch of tricks to keep engagement up. No way they let you off the hook to use what's costly without being exposed to what drives the income stream.
Open APIs, that's what you need. Obviously Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Chat, etc don't have any, for the above reasons.
I'm honestly surprised that email is still a thing. It's the last somewhat open API around. (Unless you count HTTP..)
Well I agree in principle, but I also agree with you that the big guys aren't going to offer APIs. And even if they were, I think if you rely on some API you are going to be shut down in the long term (remember all those Twitter clients that were using the now defunct Twitter API?).
So, I think the way to go is to base everything on embeds. They are never going to get rid of the ability to embed posts/videos/tweets because it brings more traffic to their sites.
You still need a bit of scraping, in case the service in question doesn't have RSS (Youtube does for example). And yes, with scraping they will try and make your life impossible (dynamic class names etc. to make scraping hard), but you would only need it for discovering the URL of new posts/tweets/videos, and nothing else.
Thank you for pointing that out! I didn't know that until today. I also discovered that you can get RSS feeds from Reddit and a few other services (see my other comment in sibling sub thread)[1]. So, it sounds like I might be using RSS more.
For reddit, you can also look at inline-reddit.com
NewsBlur and a couple other RSS feed readers have built-in Twitter clients.
You can also use rss bridge to get Instagram in your RSS feeds.
When applied to everything, it's an RSS reader. For instance, Youtube offers RSS, so why not just put them in there? If you can find a podcast feed, you could put those in there, too. RSS readers aren't just for news sites.
My experience: It's much more common that the dramatic decline starts when the original creator(s)/product owner(s) leave the company, rather than when some product manager later on decides to go rogue.
Audible. Just let me start listening to my book. Don't force me into "Discover" every time I open the app. Discover requires a network access and keeps me from doing anything else until it times out if my connection is not good. It could show me Discover when I close a book I just finished. That would make sense and not be intrusive and rude. No, they have to shove the monetization attempt in my face over and over. What PM made these choices? Geez.
I'm sure there's some engagement KPI metric that increased from forcing it in front of users. And even if it's a worse UX experience and the increase is due to frustrated users attempting to navigate away from Discover, you know those pesky details won't be included in their product and engineering "wins" ;)
Turning them into regular audio files and using your favorite player and having proper backups of the files is so much nicer. I'd straight up not use Audible if that was not an option, it's just not worth it.
I used to really like Adobe apps. But every year the apps get slower. Every year they change some part of the UI and sometimes don't provide an option to do it the 'legacy' way.
Photoshop has changed keyboard shortcuts and reasoning behind their undo shortcuts; Indesign always centres on the selected object if you zoom out with the keyboard; Acrobat makes saving a step-by-step process... I could probably cite 20 better examples if I could be bothered.
And yet, YET, they flatly refuse to make their apps do proper mac full screen.
Then there are apps that are just bad, but shouldn't be. Take HBO Max (please, take it). Once you're actually playing media, it basically works fine, but the sheer number of bugs and brain-dead user flows is astonishing. It's so awful that user engagement numbers must be horrendous. How does a major strategic play like this go so bad for so long? The guy they brought in to build & run it (Tony Goncalves) must be great at board room maneuvers - if I was an ATT exec I'd be ready to swap him out.
Sure we can blame the Product Managers incentives, but lets look at what also guides their conclusions: "hey look at customer stared at this page for slightly longer and then accidentally clicked an ad!" not realizing the customer didn't want to do any of those things
Remember Skype? At some point it was the default messenger of most people I know. Then it progressively got worse after being bought by Microsoft, and culminated in a "redesign" which among thousands of bugs also added Snapchat-like stories and other useless shit, and was so terrible that I plain refused to ever use it again, and most of my friends did as well.
I have a Samsung TV and use the YouTube app every day. You can see when they update it, the fonts change, layout changes, etc. usually subtle stuff but sometimes there's a big change.
Anyway, for a while they had the feature where you could hold the main button on the remote while on a video, and a context menu would pop up and you could save it to watch later.
One day, that feature went away. So now you have to play the video, watch 1-2 ads, then go to the menu and add it to watch later from there.
Such a pain in the ass. I wonder why they got rid of it.
> in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product. ... the PM could go talk to them and bounce improvement ideas off them. Customers are pretty good at spotting UX goofs in the making.
AWS really does like to "bounce ideas" off customers.
To the extent that I am wondering if we should start billing them for consulting services.
A hour long meeting every other month with 3-4 senior team members adds up.
Why is "Google Play Music -> Youtube Music" not on his list. It's the perfect example of the detritus filth that flows from Google PM's.
Another example is Android Auto. I was kind of interested when Google announced it was being "optimized" to just work standalone.
The problem is, is that it is actually way more optimized for me to just use google maps and my music player and my podcast player and etc, than it is to use android auto because android auto sleeps the screen and I have to click the power button on the side to make it wake up (vs just double tap to enter the phone). smh. Just can't even get very simple things correct.
Hallelujah. I at least give praise to the PMs that make it easy for experienced users to keep their UI. I mean, if reddit ever gets rid of old.reddit.com, I'll have to find a new link aggregation forum.
On the contrary, Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups", and I hate it. Had to search around for a bunch of esoteric chrome flags settings, but even after applying those i couldnt get back to individual tabs.
The “tabs” feature is such a borked UI. I suspect they added tab groups to try and “improve” the tabs feature, but they definitely stuffed it up even worse!
Closing a tab is now horribly inconsistent and multiple clicks (plus swipes if in landscape) - arrrgh. To close a tab, the best option is now to long press the [n] tab icon (next to the vertical ellipsis), which pops up a “X close” menu option (a fairly hidden feature).
The new tabs UI is so painful I did investigate other browser options.
> Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.
I remember back at the Snow Leopard release of what is now macOS, when it was announced that this was not going to be a feature release (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/20090...), but rather a release of, basically, catching and squashing old bugs. I was so happy about that release.
Imagine if the Apple of today could manage to do that, rather than taking away yet another battle-tested, decades-old desktop convention in favour of continuing to pretend that conventions developed for mobile interaction will always, or even often, be well suited for the desktop.
This misses the biggest problem I see that has been unquestionably standardized. Living Software. At least once a week I open an app that I use regularly and it interrupts me with a notification "we've added xyz, check it out!"....like...thanks a lot for interrupting me from using your application. Or the periodic UI revamps that force me to relearn how to use something I already knew how to use. There has to be some point where we all say..."alright...enough is enough...it's done..."
I'm sure Tim Bray would be thrilled to know that my org hasn't so much as fixed a bug or investigated a crash on our mobile apps in over 2 years because our product managers have said they're not driving any revenue.
Gmail is a very good example of a finished app being tinkered with. No one asked for Meet to be integrated. There was already a good app for Meet. Then came Chat and Rooms!!
Well, it is Google. The engineers are so starved for opportunities for promotion that they've created at least one new chat platform per year for a decade.
It's not about # of customers. Even apps with billions of users can survey those users, or use some sort of a/b testing to figure out what impact any change to a product will have. The issue is just that sometimes a change might be good for new users only, or might be good for some metric the business cares about that you don't (ie maybe the Economist needed daily actives instead of weekly actives for some reason so they launched daily news). Not saying the changes are always net positive, but I don't think it's a simple as "they want to get promoted and can't talk to all their users".
Also, as much as I love AWS as a service overall, it's actual user experience is pretty terrible and I wish it did change over time (for the better).
I love airplane avionics, it never changes look at for example, once you learn how to use Garmin 430/430W you can easily figure out Garmin G1000, everything is standarized, colors are standarized, there are shit tons of abbreviations like DTK, ETA, HDG, CRS, but once you learn them once you will forever understand what they mean and why they are there. You can also understand why companies like Boeing with their 737MAX were so persistent to not change airframe and avionics too much to convince FAA that 737MAX is the same type as 737NG, because retraining pilot for new aircraft type is expensive for airlines. In consumer world i would love apps that work on the same principle, thats why i love Vim. Learn it once, use it forever.
What I think is a key contributing factor here is that we lost the ability to say "no" to updates. Before the modern era of appstores users could refuse to update the app and in doing so throw a wrench into company's plans to just ruin the user experience.
Yes. Through a combination of increased network-dependence of apps, increased pace in general of updates, system-level updates that are required for security, app updates that are required for system updates and/or security, or simply because the app just ceases to function at all without the updates, and SaaS, we have in many ways lost the ability to say "no" to updates by remaining on older software.
I'd change the closing from "we need to stop breaking software" to "we need to stop breaking processes".
This is a point of stability that Knuth tried highlighting, but gets panned for. Once a piece of foundational software is released, it has to remain stable not just in "doesn't crash" but in "doesn't change."
Common Lisp gets this right to an amusing degree by how much extension can be provided in user space. The lesson being that the less you do in the core offering, the more folks can depend on it? Maybe. Not sure, with how much that offering actually does.
I do think "enable your users" should be more the focus. Not "control your users so that they do what you think they should be doing."
I just dislike the whole “there’s an app for that” mindset. Adding an app is not a linear increase in complexity, it’s quadratic: you now need to somehow make it play well with everything you already do. I don’t want more apps, I want better apps that support more workflows in more transparent ways.
Admittedly, I don’t use a personal general-purpose computer for as many things as I used to (managing an mp3 collection is no longer a thing; movies are on a smart tv; messengers are on a phone; …), but these days I try to avoid new stuff, even where it’s a bit clunky to do things in the GUI programs I already use. Which are basically xterm, Emacs, Firefox, and Darktable like once a month.
Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.
About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community would soon catch up. But it never did. The experience is still much worse that in the Gnome 2 days. Even a few extensions that try to mimic the Gnome 2 experience can't really compensate, and many of them break with every other update. It's such a shame.
Opposite point of view to yours here (yours is equally valid). I vastly prefer Gnome 3. Less rolly thing required.
Separate to that it's not such a great example here even if you hate the change as it's a major version. Gnome 2 didn't change much where you find things and how it works for many years. Gnome 3 has been going on in a similar vein of not having changed much from a UI perspective (at least that I've noticed) for what, 8 years or so? I don't even recall the last time I had to learn something new about using it. You're completely within your rights to dislike it. There's mate and xfce for you that might be more to your taste. And as an aside, isn't just seriously cool that we have good options and alternatives if we don't like the way something goes on the linux desktop? When Apple/MS change you go with them or dump everything you use and how you use it to shift to a competitor. Gnome to xfce is pretty straightforward and you use it to use all the same software applications.
The Google Play Store App itself has gotten worse. It is no longer possible to view a summary of the Apps you are downloading, you have to remember each app and then open the page for that app to see how far the download has progressed. I don't understand how/why such basic features are removed..
Google Maps on iOS comes to my mind after reading this article. The amount of unnecessary stuff Google has lately stuffed in there has crippled the app to and has slowed it down even on my iPhone 11. I miss the fast and no-nonsense Maps app from 5ish years ago when it used to "just work".
In a way I am happy about this.
I am running a small business and for about 10 years I am the underdog of a certain app category. I maintain the app with just a few people. And despite the fact we cannot compete with the bigger players on certain things like data quality, size, comprehensiveness etc. We actually have a very straight to the point UI and no overly intrusive advertisement or other customer pay now tricks. We do not collect or use any data. Nothing. Zero.
And yet we have millions of active users per day.
> At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn’t take pictures much any more. I miss them.
Oh What a time to bring this up. Just when I am losing confidence in Apple. iMoves and iPhotos, I remember the backlash in 2008 / 2009. But everyone ( including myself ) were too focused on iPhone we sort of brush aside those mistakes. And to be fair iPhone was far more important.
On the other hand, theres YT which has remained pretty much the same UI-wise for as long as I can remember. And it is terrible.
I cannot search for videos about python that are longer than 1 hr. That is my pet peeve and regularly drives me up the wall. I have wanted this for years.
In addition to that, my feed is static. It's like I'm being told, "hey you, we know that you will like these and I won't show you aught else until you watch them first". Aarrrghhh.
Well, you could always click the ambiguous three dots with a 5 pixel click target and chose "Not Interested". Super convenient to do for the hundred videos on the front page (of which you have already watched >50% within the last month).
I'm a digital product manager, and I concur with everything that Tim stated in his post...however, the sad part is - at least where i have worked - there is inertia from higher up that forces (yes *forces*) certain directions. "You have to keep adding to your products, else they're considered dying!...yada yada yada" I've even heard that in other places of business, there isn't a forcing function so much as incentives to "keep innovating"..."Hey, if you want your bonus, you have to show that you did something to your products...yada, yada, yada..." Which, unfortunately leads to what Tim so rightly noted about there being a cost to the user, etc. For every X numbers of frustrated users out there, there are a number of frustrated/blocked product managers...i sure feel that way.
(Maybe i should have stayed as a web dev. years ago...life was simpler back then, and not as rife with frustrations with other humans as it is nowadays. /sigh)
Muscle memory is a thing and moving buttons around makes using the app harder.
Similarly, I want apps to realize that is not the only app I have on my phone and my life is not going to revolve around using it.
I long for a culture of Software as a Tool, like the hammer in my garage, it exists for when I need it. It does not beckon me for attention or email me about how the handle got updated. It will not need a huge update the moment I pick it up. I do not want to log into my hammer.
Perhaps I am nostalgic for pre-fast internet software. You acquire some bit of software and install it and it is what it is until you, the person using the thing, goes and installs the newest version.
You would get used to the bugs in the version you had - knowing they wouldn't go away - but the software still had utility and you kept using it. Now I get used to something and it changes every 2 weeks and every not and then it breaks something I liked leaving me frustrated and complaining into the void.
When a product feature plateaus, the team starts inventing work from top down instead of bottom up; so as to keep themselves busy. The oblique objective is that, that the product becomes worse.
The Citibike app is a great example of an app that has gotten way worse for no good reason at all. They've cut a lot of features like being able to see available docks prior to undocking a bike (i.e. for route planning), and you used to be able to add friends on your ride without them needing to sign up separately, which is completely gone. The bike unlocking experience has also gotten significantly worse, and will sometimes refuse to unlock a bike when it insists that you "aren't at the station" even though you are. It also treats all stations as points when in reality some are a block long, so if you're at a dock trying to unlock a bike and you happen to be far from the point the app thinks the station is located at, it can fail. Oh, and GPS drift caused by tall buildings is killer.
The whole app has gotten significantly worse since the Lyft takeover.
"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"
I think it's something else. It's first of all a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of "keeping up with the Joneses" brinksmanship. When Hulu releases a shiny new homepage layout, the Director of Amazon Prime Video probably fires off a memo to the PMs and designers and UI/UX researchers (haha I joke), demanding that they also refresh their style. Doesn't matter if it's perfectly fine. You need to DO something, dammit!!! And of course, since the motivating factor was how beautiful the competitor's UI is, you need to make your UI equally pretty. Usability? Who cares. The CEO/Director probably doesn't even use the product, his/her kids do.
Ex File Explorer Pro remains the best file manager for Android. It's the only one that treats network shares as seamlessly as local file folders and support tabbed folder windows. Unfortunately if you want to use it you have to get an APK from before the developer was bought out by a malware company.
I use Philips hue, they recently upgraded their Android app and it's much crappier of a user experience. The lights are far harder to control with more clicks, and all the graphical changes are a sidestep not an upgrade. Very sad update.
I've stopped buying stuff like that because I know the experience is going to be bad. I bought a bike computer recently and ruled out anything that connects to a phone.
You know whats amusing to me - All of the complaints with regard to Electron, many of which could have been avoided if the application was just delivered as a simple website.
Most people have chrome/edge/firefox/whatever warmed up on their machine. Opening a new tab to spotify.com takes under a second, assuming you are using any caching at all. Opening an electron app cold is almost certainly going to take longer and hurt your system resources more.
I feel like Spotify is a case where native desktop app doesn't make as much sense as something like Discord, where you do need a lot of native hooks for the 2-way nature of the product.
I'm a sysadmin and the amount of times Office 365 security admin pages has changed in the last year's is madening. AWS's UI sucks hairy balls (e.g.: security group links) but at least is stable.
Are there any PMs or devs out there who A/B test many/most bug fixes or performance improvements?
In principle, a minor bug fix and a feature aren't all that different. There's a control experience and a new experience, and an A/B test can compare their performance.
In practice, I find many features are run with stat sig analysis of their impact, whereas UX bugs are either not fixed (not important enough) or fixed, without measuring their impact.
Of course experience-breaking bugs should be deployed at 100%. But what about all those UX bugs that are in a flow which is shipped and kinda working already?
Wouldn't it be interesting to see that a UX "fix" actually performs worse? Or, wouldn't it be nice to know when a UX fix produces a measurable performance increase?
My anecdote: A scrolling bug on a mobile web sign-in page. It's 1 field form - email address. On mobile web, you can't scroll to see the email field when you have the on-screen keyboard open. This page is the top of funnel for a promotional offer via ads. It's obviously broken, but it's already shipped and (surprisingly?) actually kinda working. Would you fix it at 100% rollout, or do it via an experiment, or not fix it? Why?
Curious if anybody has other experiences to share about this idea :-)
My grandma had a story about the devil's son's eye. The boy had such pretty eyes, that the devil couldn't help but caress constantly, while saying "my son got such good eyes!". Until, one day, the devil pierces one of them. By accident, while fondling it.
I think that story illustrates why software gets worse: it's less about the company caring too little about it, and more about caring too much. It sees its software becoming popular, liked, and the people in that company (I don't think it's just the PM, but everyone) feel the urge to "do" something. Make it better, bigger, more functional, oh look we should add the kitchen sink too, but not we need to rip apart the old floor because it is not waterproof, "it'll be fine".
>Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.
Or maybe software companies should ask more input from users before, when, and after they make changes on how the software works. Bad software changes can be rolled back, unlike the devil's son's eye.
On other side, some apps remain crippled from birth and adamantly ignore millions of requests for the most basic features for decades.
Looking at you Google and YouTube and your lack of a fucking auto-repeat button even though you have an annoying ass auto-next button which I have to remember to disable way too often >__<#
Or the inability of Instagram, an app dedicated to sharing photos, to let you view photos in full screen, full quality, without cropping, and save them.
Considering that often people complain about the lack of Product Managers or similar roles in most of the FOSS projects, and that nevertheless the same kind of things happens there (it is just a bit slower thanks to the lack of resources), I guess PMs are not the only culprits indeed.
That's true. I feel the urge to use new shiny stuff pretty often, but have no choice but to use old robust solutions, because new ones are just mostly proofs of concepts. This is also extremely true about the whole web-dev thing (the good ol' one JavaScript framework a day).
I guess it just comes down to working ethics. Doctors are a good example. Among them there are people who just do a job, who aren't passionate about the whole saving lives. And those are people that work directly with patients and heal people. Now imagine how bad a situation is when a person doesn't work directly with people and responsibility seems little. Among developers, there are people who are genuinely concerned about quality of the code they produce, but they are a minority. There are far more of those, who came in the field just because that's the next big thing and where the money's at. They just spend their whole day ramming that badly written code in a badly written codebase because manager told them to get it done by the end of the day. They don't see the consequences of their actions.
I read something like "a bunch of developers are controlling data of millions of people" some time ago. It feels relevant. Quite a lot of developers don't realize the scale of impact their software can have on people.
While I said all that, I don't know a single bit about what could be done against such a problem. I guess it's just our nature. It seems to shine in many other areas (politics f.e.) as well.
It's just your general mundane ignorance and wrong values.
...or simply the need to have version 6.0 after version 5.0, somethings gotta change.
Sometimes I think it would be an interesting mental exercise to convert most (all?) web pages and PC apps to something like a bog simple Windows 3.1 application. You could melt an online banking site to a handful of drop down menus and dialog boxes.
You have to wonder what the effect of ever-more-obtuse interfaces combined with visual gingerbread has on people with vision problems.
OTOH, there's apps that have been around for years where you have to wonder what they were thinking to begin with. Calibre. After Effects. Gimp.
It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML.
The second points are valid, IMO, but the first... I think this is simplistic.
First, there aren't a ton of example of software products succeeding by staying still for long. Not none, but not a ton. Even fewer, if you define success commercially. In CD days, version upgrades were often an indispensable part of the business model.
These days, apps exist in multiple device world. Big chunks of it are server based. SAAS, which most everything is to some extent, has its own business imperatives. Iphoto deals with a mostly iphone world today. The Economist, like most magazines, is trying to figure app how a software based magazine business works.
It seems naive to blame the PM. Constant change isn't a thing because PMs have egos. There's a big hairy dynamic at play. Not changing doesn't seem to be an option, in recent years, maybe ever.
Engineers would tend to want to optimize a thing for efficiency at that thing's ostensible purpose. Which means there's good engineering (the result is efficient) and bad engineering, if everything is framed within that engineering mindset. But that's not the only mindset. An allegory: A traffic engineer wants to time the traffic lights for maximum traffic throughput. It's the "right answer." Just like a music search feature with a goal of straightforwardly finding shit is the right answer. But lo and behold, the mayor and/or the local merchants don't want people to just drive easily past their businesses, they want you to have a good look, and plenty of time to consider whether to go in and shop there. So the mayor has the engineer time the lights to create a longer delay, makes him do bad engineering, to try and herd mindless, hapless consumer-meat into the store. The design is still optimized though, it's just a different parameter being optimized.
What boggles the mind is that it has a next button, which will play any random video. But no previous button, even though that's a dead simple feature.
the incentives in the industry are wrong:
- ideally, the best thing to do is do nothing, but that doesn't get recognition. hence people are always itching to tamper around.
I wonder though, whether b2b software also suffers from this, because such software isn't really made for public recognition and etc. in the first place.
Everything is being spreadsheeted to death. Shave a little here, a little there. Start talking about worker productivity instead of customer productivity. Make every decision based on "returns to the shareholder".
Can't have good things when the only thing the people making them care about is money.
I think this is an incredibly good example of missing the forest for the trees. The PMs aren't like this because they're glory seeking idiots. They're like this because as far as most of them are concerned, it's their job to constantly tweak the product to achieve business goals (which are almost always "growth").
You can't just fix this by saying "ok let's promote PMs who are obstinate about not changing things" -- this will not align their behaviour with existing customers any better, bad things do still need to change. You'd need to adjust the business goals to be aligned with stability, and that's not something you can fix in a performance review. That's not even something you can fix at a company level.
It's just consumption-driven capitalism in action.
I think the explanation for this comes down to same dynamic involved in Microsoft eating the office application world in the 90s; People who buy the application for X feature will still buy it or stay with it with X feature now crappier while people want Y feature, even if it's crappy will now also the app - especially if the app is a market leader.
In software development, there's an internal to the company dynamic where the designer/lead-architect/etc wants to show value to the company and so rework the architecture into the current thing or some idiocy of their own devising and this is how features worsen. You can call this a extra process but I think of this as just the way economic dynamic happens. If this dynamic didn't still make the company, it would be stopped.
You spoke my mind in this short but spot-on article. I think that this is a problem that deserves to be studied deeply. I've seen many apps turn into really bad UX. Many are mentioned in the comments.
Now the question is: how can we determine whether the new app update is better or worse?
I think PMs and developers intend to produce better apps; but don't they realize that their updates are bad? That's why this issue needs more research to be understood IMO.
I think one of the indirect reasons is that in this world of countless options and emerging new things, people (including PMs and developers) don't want anymore to spend their years working on one thing and making / keeping it great. I'm sure there a lot more to it than this...
As an analytics guy, we deserve some blame, but also can and should be part of the solution. Anybody working on a public website in the last 12 months has had their senses sharpened about page speed issues thanks to Google’s carrot of AMP-free news placement for fast sites and a badge of shame and lower rankings for slow sites. Lighthouse has been instructive. Apps across platforms from mobile, desktop, smart TV, auto, and more could benefit from the same treatment.
- Analytics packages need to shrink. Most can be under 5kb, but rarely are.
- excessive event tracking and demanding items like scroll listeners need to die
- Ad tracking is completely nonchalant about speed, and oftentimes chains dozens of tags (or hundreds to thousands for header bidding)
Analysts can save the day by tracking the right metrics:
- time and clicks in navigation should be tracked and optimized for minimal use. Get users to content fast.
- rage buttons. No lengthy surveys, just allow users to indicate they are angry at a feature. Count the times it gets clicked per location.
- Optimize towards retention signals first. They matter far more than conversions. Look at the usage patterns of users that don’t return and/or churn. The top-line funnel will sing if users are pleased with the UX. This matters as much for desktop tools as it does for SaaS.
- Each deployment with UX implications deserves tagging and long-term measurements. Look for how long it takes users to adapt to changes, and not just when it’s brand new. More clicks is probably worse, don’t brag about that.
- Sometimes a longer session means more contented usage, but often it means more frustration.
- pay close attention to engagement with settings UX. That’s where people go when the UX isn’t right.
- Give users some access to the dashboards you look at, if feasible. I’m a firm believer that people being measured should be able to observe some form of what is derived from that data. If PMs exist to improve user engagement, engage them in the process. Two-way mirrors, whether virtual or physical, are creepy AF.
Maybe it’s the understanding of the premise that most software has to be created iteratively that is flawed. It can be created iteratively. But it doesn’t always have to be iterated upon so much after that. Certainly not all of them.
I think it comes down to measuring the wrong things. Reminds me of the story where a flight was 30 minutes delayed. Instead of delaying all downstream flights affected by this by 30 minutes, the airline repurposed the plane for a flight that would qualify as on-time. So they had a few customers that were irate rather than a lot that were slightly annoyed. But it was because the metric the airline was evaluated on was percentage of on-time departures — once a flight was late, it didn’t matter how late.
Correct. But I would argue that they probably measure the right thing. It’s probably better for an airline to have .1% of super-angry customers than 3% of frustrated customers. At least that’s the directions that they all have taken.
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.
It's not like proprietary software is made to make the users' life better. It's made to make money. They need to appease the users somewhat, but it's far from the top priority; in fact, often it's the opposite. They cram in as much profitable abuse as they can away with - see for example Netflix's or booking.com's UX, chock-full of dark patterns.
David Pogue delivered a nice TED Talk 2006 [1], when he's enthusiastic about a new version of a program that didn't change a thing but just made it more robust.
I'm nut sure but I think they change their UX/UI about once a month, it's so extremely frustrated that a banking app, which is just a tool, not for entertainment, has to be figured out again and again because they keep changing it. Without adding anything. The UX never improves, just changes...
The Nubank app has just been redesigned. While I won't state that it's worse than the previous version, I am certainly sure it isn't any better. The thing is, right now, I can't seem to find anything in the app, since the redesign changed the location of all the things.
As a user I've definitely seen this. But as a PM (product manager) in tech I have not. Most PMs I know push back against UI changes that UI/UX experts push forward because we know (I've been a PM in this position) it will annoy users and add very little value.
I've been saying this since 2016. This is especially the case with Google apps, which across the board are decaying in usability and functionality. When I said that a few years ago, I was scorned. I think everyone is slowly coming to the same realization now.
We need to get rid of project managers, until we have people who have no art trying to make a career out of nothing, then we have no choice but to end up with stuff filled with "smart" ideas
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.
iOS 15 Safari is the tipping point in terms of mass reach and awfulness. Scrolling an element (not the page), to view more of that element, shows the address bar over it. ?!
The way people takes photos changed (using phones instead of cameras changes the frequency and type of pictures) so iPhoto had to change to accommodate the new users and usage pattern, or go stale and cater an ever decreasing user base.
You’re damned if you do and you damned if you don’t. If you find a great UX for your app and decide to keep it that way, 5 years later all potential new users will look and say “that’s old, isnt there a modern app for this?”
It’s silly, just like fashion, but software has a user base way beyond tech enthusiasts and that user base is very sensitive to cues similar to the fashion industry.
This isn’t wrong but it misses other factors like dark patterns. These show up when there is an incentive to maximize time on the app, spending, get people to opt into surveillance, or herd customers into a cloud option so they can be put into a subscription model later.
Bingo. Companies (and definitely, PMs) are focusing on engagement, retention, multi-channel, and recurring revenue - all part of modern business models.
It's far easier to make something worse than make it better. There are few good solutions to problems, but infinite bad ones. Sometimes change is called for, but it needs to be done carefully and only when necessary.
Fundamentally, you need a healthy balance between conservatism and liberalism. Software companies don't have enough reverence for the former, and perhaps they're structured in ways that incentivizes the latter far more than they ought.
One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me other movies. I can scroll only in order of newest-oldest purchase order. The more titles I have, the worse the experience is.
Fuck 'em and their dark patterns. I'm happier going old-school and buying blue-rays from the criterion collection.
My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which matched.
Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now:
- The Grand Tour
- The Grand Tour presents: Lochdown
- The Grand Tour (again? must be a different season?)
- The Grand Tour (yes, again)
- The Tomorrow War
- The Office
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
And just for fun, let's list the next 9:
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- Borat 2
- South Park
- South Park (again)
- South Park (again)
It's baffling to me that table-stakes features like this can be completely neglected for a product which is obviously a massive capital investment. I do think I understand now why it is that my friend with Prime Video watches The Office almost all of the time...
Edit: Apparently searching for "stand-up comedy live" or simply "comedy live" does show the type of content the search implies. I'd be keen to have someone explain what non-live stand-up comedy looks like to justify the difference in interpretation. Perhaps they could also tell me about how "stand-up" carries zero usable information...
Not so sure. I accidentally forgot to unsubscribe from the Prime emails way back, so once a week I get an email recommending shows I've already seen. Such as TGT, South Park, the individual presenters from TGT and so on. Oh, and they're also kind enough to remind me about their app...which is the one I'm already using to see their shows...
I'm leaning more towards laziness and lack of creativity.
Heh. I am so sick of all the movie apps and how hard it is to find which one has what, plus the fact that they all only have American superhero movies, that I started renting discs again.
Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It works really well.
In my relatively recent experience they are letting it die just by not replacing content that they once had. That said, I am probably underestimating how difficult it is to find replacements.
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 playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All" next to that to find it.
I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!