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Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if n

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like a cancer on the web anymore. You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. The old, pre-design-goober Google Apps interface worked. I seriously want to punch a hipster every time I have to use an app that used to work and has now been designed to death.

digi_owl 10y ago
And once more i am surprised about who comments on HN. Hi Hannibal. Edit: and yeah, i have had similar thoughts about designers ruining things. My particular hobbyhorse in that regard is _nix desktop environments.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > My particular hobbyhorse in that regard is _nix desktop environments. Oh yes, that reminds me: GNOME now pops up a message bar informing one that one has no messages every time one's mouse hits the bottom of the screen, and steals focus from the currently-running app. Why? I never used to worry about messages, I still have none, and I keep on dying while I'm playing computer games because suddenly the game no longer responds to my input. I realised long ago that the GNOME developers neither like, nor respect, nor indeed care for their users (c.f. the fact that after a decade it still hasn't added the ability to properly configure the screensaver), but even this seems a little much.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I have heard, basically from the horses mouth, that users are idiots. The Gnome devs apparently did some usability testing, and came away with that opinion...
    - Declanomous 10y ago
      So gnome devs treat their users like morons. Their users leave to use KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc, and find the desktop environment satisfactory. I think this says more about the devs than it does the desktop environment, unless the fact that GNOME used to ship with Ubuntu skewed things.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Dunno about KDE, they seem to be following in Gnome's footsteps these days. As for XFCE and Cinnamon, they have limited options as more and more Gnome assumptions gets baked into GTK (vanishing scrollbars anyone?). Our best bet may be XLQT, but they were lacking in manpower.
        braveo 10y ago
        I've been a happy user of i3 for years now. I preferred KDE until 4 came out. From my perspective it was horrible and I went looking for an alternative. I found a home in i3 and would never go back, even if KDE went back to the old desktop. When in Windows land I use virtuawin, but it doesn't touch i3.
        dragandj 10y ago
        Me too. Set up xmonad several years ago, and almost haven't touched it since. It just works. No annoyances, I can concentrate on my work!
        scrollaway 10y ago
        LXQt is still going and still lacking in manpower. I used to do UX for it and still do when I have spare time but the project needs more people. If anyone wants to help, email me, jerome at leclan dot ch
chrisdotcode 10y ago
The usability issues compound when that page was created with 1.2MB of JS (and another 2MB of ads), and I have to see a loading spinning wheel when it could have been easily been static content. ...And then when the page loads, I accidentally click an ad instead of a link because the ad moved over the content that I was reading to offer me 10% of joining the exclusive mailing list.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah you would have thought that constantly rearranging pages would have been something that went away alongside dialup...
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    This is literally the reason why I use ad block. I don't mind ads, but I can't stand webpages where the ad drops in an changes the whole layout. Congrats, you win 0 revenue from me!
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Ditto - especially when I'm halfway through the first paragraph of an article and it slides it down offscreen, so I scroll down to keep reading, then the ad goes away and the place I was reading goes back up off screen. It's criminal. Further, on my phone especially, I like to read articles while on the train. My trip has cell signal at every stop along the way, but not between stations. Before Apple allowed adblockers in Safari, I'd have about a 1/10 chance of actually getting the article to load before I lost signal. Now, it works great just about every time.
- flukus 10y ago
  This should be something the browser handles. Only register a click of the element was there a few milliseconds ago when you "mentally clicked".
- this-dang-guy 10y ago
  I watch my ublock log to decide if I'm ever visiting a site again - if the log has more than just cdns and maybe a google ad or too - I'm history. I deliberately set it to allow the bing/google ads and the analytics, but I'm not allowing everything under the sun.
Humdeee 10y ago
Changing for the sake of change as the primary reason usually never works well with an established user base. Other examples are the Nike+ web and mobile interface, Blizzard's Battle.net 2.0 (labelled by the community as 0.2), the hotmail email client portal, and the Windows 8 UI in it's entirety.
coldtea 10y ago
>You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. Political views aside (and the post doesn't concern those either), this is quite relevant: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
- jonstokes 10y ago
  That's a great link. I agree with all of it.
- pc2g4d 10y ago
  But the mobile experience sucks :-(
  - robk 10y ago
    On mobile use idrudgereport.com - it sequences the columns as one and is far more readable
  - cynwoody 10y ago
    On my S7 Edge, the page is too small to read (except for the headline, obviously). However, I can pick a column and double-tap it. The Android browser smart-zooms, and I can read the content just fine. If something's too small, I can finger-spread. For instance, it's easy to smart-zoom the link list in the center column, scroll down to a columnist, finger-spread to increase the target size, and click through to his latest.
- lostsock 10y ago
  I have no idea where to look on that page (meaning the Drudge Report website). Maybe once you're "used to it" it becomes easy to parse but I've just spent a minute looking at it and I'm not even entirely sure what the site is about? It's compared to mainstream news sites so is it meant to be a news site? For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" What does that even mean?
  - 10y ago
FilterSweep 10y ago
Is it the stylization, or is it feature-overload and overall "bloat" of software and web apps? Or, is it the overload of 3rd party scripts meant to harvest your information and sell it off to affiliate marketers? Or is it some of all of the above? I think some of the newer age design techniques, such as responsive design, are very elegant compared to any slight performance costs of some of CSS3's new features. As another example, iTunes was really soul-killing at its introduction of Apple music, making most of its tabs functioning related to Apple music. You can tell the Value decision was to make Apple Music take more precedence over management of one's own music. From a "stylistic" or aesthetic standpoint, the Desktop iTunes hasn't changed in its overall "design" from iTunes 3 to iTunes 11 (bit of an opinion here). Now, more recent versions did add more icons which makes the UX more miserable, but my take is iTunes/iOS music app was killed off by its feature overload. :ED: clarification on final <p>.
usaphp 10y ago
> "Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable" Did it ever occurs to you that they had far less functionality when these examples were created? Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.
- treehau5 10y ago
  > Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed. Wow that's the first time I have heard the problem phrased this way. Usually it's the other way around -- the designers and product leads want to pile on so many features and the backend devs can't keep up, so the codebase turns into a rotten pile of shit.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    I don't think thats actually true. Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.
    - mianos 10y ago
      Do you think it's the product people asking for grey fonts on a light grey background? (What the article is saying).
    - flukus 10y ago
      > Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case? For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too. So not sure what you are referring to.
js8 10y ago
> Designers are ruining software in general. I agree with you. But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers. I think it all comes down to humility. Think about and respect the user. Do usability studies and follow their results, like Microsoft used to do in 90s. Don't let your notions of aesthetics overrule the needs or wishes of the users, and especially wish for things not to change.
- eitland 10y ago
  Not saying this is always the case but I wonder if, in some of the cases, this is what makes it hard for designers to get accepted in open source: the fact that many of the developers are also users and as such are pretty opinionated while the designers that come to open source might often be very eager to "set their mark" on something?
  - js8 10y ago
    I wouldn't judge designers this way. I think they are users too, but they have a certain aesthetics, that can be even more subjective than, say, software architecture. And in OSS you cannot really do usability studies, it's expensive (although commercial companies don't do them much today either, I think). I think the problem really is lack of humility of some designers, which was trend-set by Steve Jobs. SJ didn't do what users wanted, he had a very strong sense of his own aesthetics (lack of buttons, for instance). This IMHO works if you can create fashion trend around it, but otherwise, it leaves a lot of people (maybe even majority) in the cold.
    - ozgung 10y ago
      No, this is the most common misconception about Steve Jobs. It's like another cancer affecting the young entrepreneurs and designers. He didn't have strong opinions on many things, he had a very compotent team and he continually pushed his teams to their limits. iPhone was the result of a long and iterative design process involving many smart people. Here is the ancestor of the iPhone from 1983: http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983 http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983 Apple was working on the tablet project (iPad) long before they were working on the phone project. First iPhone designs indeed had physical buttons like iPods of the time. Then they decided to marry the phone project and the tablet project. Hence a phone with a multi-touch screen. Of course all of these are marketed as if Steve Jobs was a genius and everything was so obvious to him from the beginning. That's just not true.
falcolas 10y ago
Oddly enough, Reddit becomes much more usable with RES and keyboard navigation. It's primarily a consumption site, which makes the ability to expand images inline and navigate with the keyboard very valuable. The vanilla experience where you're constantly linking off to other heavy-weight sites and frequently reloading the reddit page when you come back (a trend I wish modern web browsers would burn) is rather negative. With that in mind, it seems that simple text and links is perhaps not the optimal experience for every web site.
- jbpetersen 10y ago
  Are you familiar with Vimium? I've been using it for keyboard navigation and RES for the rest.
- braveo 10y ago
  I use RES, but I hate most parts of it. Have you ever compared the page load times of reddit with and without RES? It's horrific. And adjusting the settings? they have search functionality for the settings because there's so many settings. The only things I use from RES are the account manager and the subreddit manager. I hate the never ending reddit with a burning passion, and don't even get me started on the highlighting posts that you've clicked on crap. RES is a bloated monstrosity.
  - wott 10y ago
    It is very slow indeed. And I have the feeling it continues consuming resources even when the page is finally loaded and stabilised, because my browser gets somewhat slower when I have reddit+RES in a tab, even though I haven't switched to that tab in a while.
mhurron 10y ago
> Reddit works You know what I really hate about reddit? The inconsistency of the links. If the link is a self.subreddit link, it goes to the discussion thread, if it was a submitted link to a location outside of reddit, the link goes to that page and to see the discussion thread you have to click on the small 'comment' link. I wouldn't say reddit works any more than a 'designed to death' site, just that it hasn't been 'designed to death.' It is full of it's own problems.
- swiley 10y ago
  Where else would a self.reddit link go? Also, the comments link always goes to the same place.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    But the link does not always go the the same place. I personally am always clicking on external links when I meant to go to the discussion page. I would have the main link always go to the discussion page, if there is an associated external link, have it listed under the main link. Lets see if I can get this to show what I mean (grabbed from the front page) What is the most 2000s thing you can think of? submitted 5 hours ago by enormous-radio to /r/AskReddit 4741 comments share Police vehicle rams protesters at anti-U.S. rally in the Philippines Link: somewhere.latimes.com submitted 7 hours ago by wilson_rawls to /r/news 561 comments share The main target is consistent, there is a clear external link if it exists. Probably could drop the Link: part.
    - Deimorz 10y ago
      The way I think of it is that clicking on the title is taking you to the content. For a self-post, the content is posted on reddit itself, so the content location is the same as the comments page. That being said, they've made a few steps toward something closer to your suggestion in some places. For example, if you do a search, the search results behave this way, where clicking the title always takes you to the comments and there's a separate link (with a chain-link icon) to go to the linked content.
emodendroket 10y ago
Hacker News is guilty of exactly this on downvoted posts.
- majewsky 10y ago
  The low contrast text? You realize that this is a feature?
  - kps 10y ago
    Most bad design decisions are considered ‘features’ by those responsible.
    - combatentropy 10y ago
      Downvoted posts are meant to be harder and harder to read.
      - kps 10y ago
        They are. This merges “I disagree with this” and “No one should read this”, yielding “No one should read things I disagree with”.
        edejong 10y ago
        At least this makes the decision explicit, as opposed to the editing bubbles created by popular social networks.
      - knieveltech 10y ago
        Obviously. Not everyone finds that endearing.
      - the_other 10y ago
        This invites a kind of trolling. Imagine a bunch of people down-vote a comment quickly (justified or not), making it hard to read. Later readers who may have different opinions are discouraged from expressing them (up-voting) because the comment has become so hard to read it may not get read.
zeveb 10y ago
> I seriously want to punch a hipster every time I have to use an app that used to work and has now been designed to death. Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. I just want to sit folks down in a chair and ask them why they hell they broke something that needed no fixing. It wasn't a problem, and now it is. I want to quote the 90s classic Billy Madison at them: > Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. I read websites on a daily basis where image loading is broken without JavaScript, and where focusing the page takes over a second while it loads images — when HTML has supported images for over two decades. I read websites where even with every blocker I know of used at once can't keep them readable. I use software clearly designed to only be usable by a teenager with perfect vision and thirteen thumbs. Why do people do this?
- Declanomous 10y ago
  Because HTML isn't sexy.
  - the_other 10y ago
    It freakin' is!! Well crafted, semantically rich markup can be a beauty to behold. It's a shame webapps have obscured the craft behind an opaque veil of nested `<div>` tags.
- braveo 10y ago
  > Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. Are you me? I'm the epitome of the old grumpy programmer. I have this love/hate relationship with technology. One the one hand I still love it, on the other hand I hate 99.9% of the tech I come into contact with because it's always shit for some reason or other.
  - protomyth 10y ago
state 10y ago
As a designer, I agree completely. The problem is: interaction design really is a discipline in its absolute infancy. It's not graphic design. It's not engineering. It's not architecture. Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and start doing it. And the people who decide to ship shitty designs you're complaining about are more concerned with 'pageviews' or 'installs' (and in turn, their bonus) than actual usability. Compare the process by which an app or website design makes it out into the world to how a patch makes it into an open source project. Anyone can start programming, but to be accepted as a 'good' programmer you're inevitably vetted by other, better programmers. The ad-hoc peer-review of OSS actually works reasonably well. Most importantly: it can be very critical. Most designers I meet today have laughably thin skin. Try comparing the most successful projects on GitHub to those on Dribble. Dribble makes my skin crawl. Anyway, you're right. Most contemporary interaction design is absolutely awful. It's going to take time for the rules of the discipline to evolve. We'd probably see this improve a lot if the apps and sites we used weren't optimized for 'engagement'. They just look like slot machines designed by Portlandia characters.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  I would agree that interaction design for the web is in it's infancy inasmuch as it still displays a tendency to stick it's fork in the power outlet when left unsupervised. Otherwise I disagree strongly. All of the design lessons learned leading up to the .com implosion have had to be collectively re-learned at least twice (remember jello mold layouts? eyeroll) in the last 15 years. The root problem: designers either refuse to make peace with the fact that layout and control interfaces have been largely solved problems for close to 20 years now, or they fail miserably at conveying these limitations to potential clients.
  - state 10y ago
    I'm not saying progress isn't happening — I'm saying that there's a big difference between a discipline and what interaction design is in 2016. I think these incremental steps are good, but it's going to take the equivalent of the Bauhaus to solve this problem. You need a strong foundational movement to anchor people's work. You're right that the problems have been solved, but they aren't being upheld very well.
ryuker16 10y ago
Id imagine designers are well aware of the issues of unreadable text for those with vision problems. Some of these apps are targeting a younger demographic exclusively. If you do stuff that pisses off 25% of your base or makes your app unusable, the complaints will be swift..... then management is on your ass. I run a few online store..... know exactly when the payment proccessing app or cart is having issues/ unusable becuase my customers will call me.
duncan_bayne 10y ago
> At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. That statement literally made me slightly irritated.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  No, I think when something angers us suddenly we do litterally become crazy (call it "mad" if you like). But only for a second or so. Sane people don't pound fists on desks because of what some lights on a screen are doing.
DrScump 10y ago
Designers are ruining software in general. Or, is it that designers making decisions in a vacuum are ruining software in general? One huge problem with interface design in industry segments for which I am a heavy/detailed user is that the major design choices are made by people who have never actually used the system in question and seek no input from those who have (e.g. Focus Groups, or simply observant-to-potentially-annoying-degrees users like myself). Case in point: ticket management and sales systems. Example 1: Ticketmaster's mobile resale interface that was replaced in 2014 or so. It was so stupid that if you were seeking, say, 3 tickets for an event, it would show you all listings offering 3 or more... even if you could not possibly purchase 3 from those sets! Many customers unknowingly bought more tickets than requested. Any knowledgeable user would have spotted that; I did in 10 minutes. It remained unchanged and without warning until the whole site was redone. Example 2: Tickets.com "My Tickets" account interface. In the general case, a given ticket has a barcode; they changed the mobile site to display the barcode when you drill down to ticket detail. Nice idea, since you could then just show your phone at the gate if you forgot your hard tickets. Anyway, also, in many cases, a ticketholder may want to make a note pertaining to a given ticket, e.g. "Given to Dave and Carolyn for anniversary; don't resell these, you idiot." So, in Spring of 2014 (I think), they decided to have the desktop system allow display of barcodes as well. Um, OK. However, they implemented this by having that overlay/replace the Notes, so therefore you could not only not see any given note, you could not even see that any note had ever been entered. See the hazard here? Poor Dave and Carolyn get shut out at the gate and embarrassed because you later resold their tickets because your careful notation was silently disposed of. Anyway, after I pointed that out to them, their solution was to roll back and give up on the barcode display feature altogether, rather than provide access to both. All of these problems (and many others) could have been avoided simply by inviting and encouraging feedback from your power users before tearing out your load-bearing walls of code.
braveo 10y ago
I haven't updated my iphone because I read the notes and one of the things it does is give me a "new and improved" maps application. The last time apple did that to me I stopped being able to turn randomize on and off in the music app (they did eventually bring it back, but I was floored that it was ever removed in the first place). The thing is, I have exactly 0 complaints about the map app. They can only make it worse. So I'm avoiding the entire update because I'm afraid they're going to do to the map app what they did to the music app.
SilasX 10y ago
Reddits starting to not-work -- when I hit the Back button, there's a noticeable lag for the page to re-render and then it's in the wrong place.
protomyth 10y ago
I listen to less music in my car because iTunes is such a pain in the butt to listen to your own music on the device. Audible has an acceptable interface so I listen to more audio books. I'm starting to think the people working on iTunes hate music. Never mind replacing the rating I spent years setting with a friggin like button.
- thirdsun 10y ago
  Although I think it's trivial to disable Apple Music's service in the app, thereby putting the focus on local content, you should try Ecoute, an alternative iOS music player that shows your music in an easy to understand grid, uses your existing library and is consistent with the play state of the default app so that you can use both apps interchangeably.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Disabling Apple Music doesn't fix the UI. Its truly horrible and uses the space poorly. I thought apps got rejected for duplicating functionality of provided apps? I think I shall try my hand one weekend at doing a classic music player.
AznHisoka 10y ago
Evernote is another one of those apps that used to just work and now their search box is almost frustratingly invisible and hard to find.
wott 10y ago
The cancer has now spread to each professional, industrial, each institutional site I use. One after another, they fell into the mobile-friendly but desktop-unfriendly and any-real-use-unfriendly fad: white space everywhere, flat design, white text; the amount of information on a screen has been divided by 2, by 3, by 4, I don't know, with wide spaces on the sides, with huge vertical space between each line of information, and each 'cell' containing fewer pieces of information. Oh, and bloody fat flat meaningless icons everywhere. Was it at least to add features? to improve features? No, there are less features, it takes more operations to achieve the same features, and there is a whole new set of bugs, while the previous set had been corrected along the years. Moreover, the result is generally more sluggish and ressource-consuming than the previous version.
- viraptor 10y ago
  There are practical reasons for it. My business website gets 98% mobile traffic. Pretty much anything I'll do about it, I'll do with mobile on mind. If the original design wasn't responsive by default, I don't think I'd even implement a different view for the desktop.
  - DocTomoe 10y ago
    Maybe you get 98% mobile traffic because your site is unusable on desktops?
    - viraptor 10y ago
      No, it's a landing page and virtually all visits are from mobile devices. It's the first click of unique visitors - they didn't have the choice of the platform.
this-dang-guy 10y ago
Well, I like when people design for accessibility, like these guys: http://werebooks.org/robert-e-howard/guns-of-the-mountains/ http://werebooks.org/robert-e-howard/guns-of-the-mountains/ I mean, I can read that. On anything. Compared to most of the modern half-grey stuff, it's excellent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JoshMnem 10y ago
> You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. The old, pre-design-goober Google Apps interface worked. I agree completely. Take a look at sites like Craig's List, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Reddit, and Hacker News. Fancy design doesn't make a website good, but it often makes a website bad. Two of the worst trends at the moment are bright colors and senseless animation.
yoz-y 10y ago
There is so much hate on the Apple Music app, but for me the reality is that it is the application where Apple has shown the most humility recently. On iOS they have back-pedalled a lot and now it has just huge text and large thumbnails. Visible local state indicators and huge buttons for control (albeit accessible from a not so obvious three dot button - which is large and red)
omnimus 10y ago
1. Whats good design is very differend thing for hard geek power users vs regular people. Complain as you want, there is thousands of ones like you and milions of the regular users. Products are made for the mass. 2. Good interface is not about amout of clicks or even time spend. Its about how easy it is to use. Its about pace and how much you have to think about it. 3. There are so many bad designers out there. Its same for programming, but you wont necessary see the bad code. The percentages will be similar. The pitfall is that self educated designers dont seem to see the depths of the problems. When you have good educated designer they almost forsee the future and are extremely aware of the big picture. Self educated programmers tend to be much more modest and aware of their capabilities because the skill is more visible. The design gets reduced to skin part of design which is marginal. 4. Design is what made all the ios android jobs. The startup boom is driven by design. Design is going to stay.
kaolti 10y ago
Let me defend designers here! While I agree we're overdoing design nowadays, I don't think it's just for the sake of it. I think the problem is there are too many goals a site has to achieve and being readable is just one of them. I would prefer to focus on specific group of people and cater to them, but very few businesses do this. Instead they want email subscribers, social engagement, comments, ads, CTA clicks, Sign ups, everything. So you end up with a mess, BUT the site satisfies measurable goals. Newsletter modals sure piss of a lot of people, but they work if your goal is getting subscriptions.
epeus 10y ago
If that's what you got from my article you didn't read it very well. Design is very important, and thoughtful designers will make good use of type. The cargo culting of design looks by people who don't understand them is much more of a problem.
BjoernKW 10y ago
It's not "designers" ruining software, it's wrong or misaligned incentives and goals. Most software isn't designed with (only) the user in mind or even just with respecting the user at all. With many free software products it's a commonly accepted view that you're not the customer but the product. In case of music apps licence restrictions are involved as well. It's probably not entirely wrong to say that apps like iTunes are in part designed to meet the requirements of lawyers, which in most cases won't align with those of the users. Moreover, developers are ruining software as well, just in different ways. Many developers focus on getting the internal design (design patterns, architecture, database design, whatever) of a software product right but tend to neglect the external, user-facing design because "UI is just a minor detail" real engineers can't be bothered with. Just have a look at applications like SoapUI or pgAdmin. They do a great job in terms of functionality but it's obvious that good usability wasn't exactly one of their requirements.
flamedoge 10y ago
4-4chan works!
jomamaxx 10y ago
"Designers are ruining software in general" Designers and Engineers collaborate to make products. Some suck, some are great. Blame bad design on bad designers, bad software on bad engs. Don't blame design or eng for existing.

digi_owl 10y ago

And once more i am surprised about who comments on HN. Hi Hannibal. Edit: and yeah, i have had similar thoughts about designers ruining things. My particular hobbyhorse in that regard is _nix desktop environments.

zeveb 10y ago
> My particular hobbyhorse in that regard is _nix desktop environments. Oh yes, that reminds me: GNOME now pops up a message bar informing one that one has no messages every time one's mouse hits the bottom of the screen, and steals focus from the currently-running app. Why? I never used to worry about messages, I still have none, and I keep on dying while I'm playing computer games because suddenly the game no longer responds to my input. I realised long ago that the GNOME developers neither like, nor respect, nor indeed care for their users (c.f. the fact that after a decade it still hasn't added the ability to properly configure the screensaver), but even this seems a little much.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I have heard, basically from the horses mouth, that users are idiots. The Gnome devs apparently did some usability testing, and came away with that opinion...
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    So gnome devs treat their users like morons. Their users leave to use KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc, and find the desktop environment satisfactory. I think this says more about the devs than it does the desktop environment, unless the fact that GNOME used to ship with Ubuntu skewed things.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Dunno about KDE, they seem to be following in Gnome's footsteps these days. As for XFCE and Cinnamon, they have limited options as more and more Gnome assumptions gets baked into GTK (vanishing scrollbars anyone?). Our best bet may be XLQT, but they were lacking in manpower.
      - braveo 10y ago
        I've been a happy user of i3 for years now. I preferred KDE until 4 came out. From my perspective it was horrible and I went looking for an alternative. I found a home in i3 and would never go back, even if KDE went back to the old desktop. When in Windows land I use virtuawin, but it doesn't touch i3.
        dragandj 10y ago
        Me too. Set up xmonad several years ago, and almost haven't touched it since. It just works. No annoyances, I can concentrate on my work!
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        LXQt is still going and still lacking in manpower. I used to do UX for it and still do when I have spare time but the project needs more people. If anyone wants to help, email me, jerome at leclan dot ch

chrisdotcode 10y ago

The usability issues compound when that page was created with 1.2MB of JS (and another 2MB of ads), and I have to see a loading spinning wheel when it could have been easily been static content. ...And then when the page loads, I accidentally click an ad instead of a link because the ad moved over the content that I was reading to offer me 10% of joining the exclusive mailing list.

digi_owl 10y ago
Yeah you would have thought that constantly rearranging pages would have been something that went away alongside dialup...
- Declanomous 10y ago
  This is literally the reason why I use ad block. I don't mind ads, but I can't stand webpages where the ad drops in an changes the whole layout. Congrats, you win 0 revenue from me!
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Ditto - especially when I'm halfway through the first paragraph of an article and it slides it down offscreen, so I scroll down to keep reading, then the ad goes away and the place I was reading goes back up off screen. It's criminal. Further, on my phone especially, I like to read articles while on the train. My trip has cell signal at every stop along the way, but not between stations. Before Apple allowed adblockers in Safari, I'd have about a 1/10 chance of actually getting the article to load before I lost signal. Now, it works great just about every time.
flukus 10y ago
This should be something the browser handles. Only register a click of the element was there a few milliseconds ago when you "mentally clicked".
this-dang-guy 10y ago
I watch my ublock log to decide if I'm ever visiting a site again - if the log has more than just cdns and maybe a google ad or too - I'm history. I deliberately set it to allow the bing/google ads and the analytics, but I'm not allowing everything under the sun.

Humdeee 10y ago

Changing for the sake of change as the primary reason usually never works well with an established user base. Other examples are the Nike+ web and mobile interface, Blizzard's Battle.net 2.0 (labelled by the community as 0.2), the hotmail email client portal, and the Windows 8 UI in it's entirety.

coldtea 10y ago

>You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. Political views aside (and the post doesn't concern those either), this is quite relevant: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

jonstokes 10y ago
That's a great link. I agree with all of it.
pc2g4d 10y ago
But the mobile experience sucks :-(
- robk 10y ago
  On mobile use idrudgereport.com - it sequences the columns as one and is far more readable
- cynwoody 10y ago
  On my S7 Edge, the page is too small to read (except for the headline, obviously). However, I can pick a column and double-tap it. The Android browser smart-zooms, and I can read the content just fine. If something's too small, I can finger-spread. For instance, it's easy to smart-zoom the link list in the center column, scroll down to a columnist, finger-spread to increase the target size, and click through to his latest.
lostsock 10y ago
I have no idea where to look on that page (meaning the Drudge Report website). Maybe once you're "used to it" it becomes easy to parse but I've just spent a minute looking at it and I'm not even entirely sure what the site is about? It's compared to mainstream news sites so is it meant to be a news site? For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" What does that even mean?
- 10y ago

FilterSweep 10y ago

Is it the stylization, or is it feature-overload and overall "bloat" of software and web apps? Or, is it the overload of 3rd party scripts meant to harvest your information and sell it off to affiliate marketers? Or is it some of all of the above? I think some of the newer age design techniques, such as responsive design, are very elegant compared to any slight performance costs of some of CSS3's new features. As another example, iTunes was really soul-killing at its introduction of Apple music, making most of its tabs functioning related to Apple music. You can tell the Value decision was to make Apple Music take more precedence over management of one's own music. From a "stylistic" or aesthetic standpoint, the Desktop iTunes hasn't changed in its overall "design" from iTunes 3 to iTunes 11 (bit of an opinion here). Now, more recent versions did add more icons which makes the UX more miserable, but my take is iTunes/iOS music app was killed off by its feature overload. :ED: clarification on final <p>.

usaphp 10y ago

> "Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable" Did it ever occurs to you that they had far less functionality when these examples were created? Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.

treehau5 10y ago
> Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed. Wow that's the first time I have heard the problem phrased this way. Usually it's the other way around -- the designers and product leads want to pile on so many features and the backend devs can't keep up, so the codebase turns into a rotten pile of shit.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  I don't think thats actually true. Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.
  - mianos 10y ago
    Do you think it's the product people asking for grey fonts on a light grey background? (What the article is saying).
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case? For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too. So not sure what you are referring to.

js8 10y ago

> Designers are ruining software in general. I agree with you. But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers. I think it all comes down to humility. Think about and respect the user. Do usability studies and follow their results, like Microsoft used to do in 90s. Don't let your notions of aesthetics overrule the needs or wishes of the users, and especially wish for things not to change.

eitland 10y ago
Not saying this is always the case but I wonder if, in some of the cases, this is what makes it hard for designers to get accepted in open source: the fact that many of the developers are also users and as such are pretty opinionated while the designers that come to open source might often be very eager to "set their mark" on something?
- js8 10y ago
  I wouldn't judge designers this way. I think they are users too, but they have a certain aesthetics, that can be even more subjective than, say, software architecture. And in OSS you cannot really do usability studies, it's expensive (although commercial companies don't do them much today either, I think). I think the problem really is lack of humility of some designers, which was trend-set by Steve Jobs. SJ didn't do what users wanted, he had a very strong sense of his own aesthetics (lack of buttons, for instance). This IMHO works if you can create fashion trend around it, but otherwise, it leaves a lot of people (maybe even majority) in the cold.
  - ozgung 10y ago
    No, this is the most common misconception about Steve Jobs. It's like another cancer affecting the young entrepreneurs and designers. He didn't have strong opinions on many things, he had a very compotent team and he continually pushed his teams to their limits. iPhone was the result of a long and iterative design process involving many smart people. Here is the ancestor of the iPhone from 1983: http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983 http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983 Apple was working on the tablet project (iPad) long before they were working on the phone project. First iPhone designs indeed had physical buttons like iPods of the time. Then they decided to marry the phone project and the tablet project. Hence a phone with a multi-touch screen. Of course all of these are marketed as if Steve Jobs was a genius and everything was so obvious to him from the beginning. That's just not true.

falcolas 10y ago

Oddly enough, Reddit becomes much more usable with RES and keyboard navigation. It's primarily a consumption site, which makes the ability to expand images inline and navigate with the keyboard very valuable. The vanilla experience where you're constantly linking off to other heavy-weight sites and frequently reloading the reddit page when you come back (a trend I wish modern web browsers would burn) is rather negative. With that in mind, it seems that simple text and links is perhaps not the optimal experience for every web site.

jbpetersen 10y ago
Are you familiar with Vimium? I've been using it for keyboard navigation and RES for the rest.
braveo 10y ago
I use RES, but I hate most parts of it. Have you ever compared the page load times of reddit with and without RES? It's horrific. And adjusting the settings? they have search functionality for the settings because there's so many settings. The only things I use from RES are the account manager and the subreddit manager. I hate the never ending reddit with a burning passion, and don't even get me started on the highlighting posts that you've clicked on crap. RES is a bloated monstrosity.
- wott 10y ago
  It is very slow indeed. And I have the feeling it continues consuming resources even when the page is finally loaded and stabilised, because my browser gets somewhat slower when I have reddit+RES in a tab, even though I haven't switched to that tab in a while.

mhurron 10y ago

> Reddit works You know what I really hate about reddit? The inconsistency of the links. If the link is a self.subreddit link, it goes to the discussion thread, if it was a submitted link to a location outside of reddit, the link goes to that page and to see the discussion thread you have to click on the small 'comment' link. I wouldn't say reddit works any more than a 'designed to death' site, just that it hasn't been 'designed to death.' It is full of it's own problems.

swiley 10y ago
Where else would a self.reddit link go? Also, the comments link always goes to the same place.
- mhurron 10y ago
  But the link does not always go the the same place. I personally am always clicking on external links when I meant to go to the discussion page. I would have the main link always go to the discussion page, if there is an associated external link, have it listed under the main link. Lets see if I can get this to show what I mean (grabbed from the front page) What is the most 2000s thing you can think of? submitted 5 hours ago by enormous-radio to /r/AskReddit 4741 comments share Police vehicle rams protesters at anti-U.S. rally in the Philippines Link: somewhere.latimes.com submitted 7 hours ago by wilson_rawls to /r/news 561 comments share The main target is consistent, there is a clear external link if it exists. Probably could drop the Link: part.
  - Deimorz 10y ago
    The way I think of it is that clicking on the title is taking you to the content. For a self-post, the content is posted on reddit itself, so the content location is the same as the comments page. That being said, they've made a few steps toward something closer to your suggestion in some places. For example, if you do a search, the search results behave this way, where clicking the title always takes you to the comments and there's a separate link (with a chain-link icon) to go to the linked content.

emodendroket 10y ago

Hacker News is guilty of exactly this on downvoted posts.

majewsky 10y ago
The low contrast text? You realize that this is a feature?
- kps 10y ago
  Most bad design decisions are considered ‘features’ by those responsible.
  - combatentropy 10y ago
    Downvoted posts are meant to be harder and harder to read.
    - kps 10y ago
      They are. This merges “I disagree with this” and “No one should read this”, yielding “No one should read things I disagree with”.
      - edejong 10y ago
        At least this makes the decision explicit, as opposed to the editing bubbles created by popular social networks.
    - knieveltech 10y ago
      Obviously. Not everyone finds that endearing.
    - the_other 10y ago
      This invites a kind of trolling. Imagine a bunch of people down-vote a comment quickly (justified or not), making it hard to read. Later readers who may have different opinions are discouraged from expressing them (up-voting) because the comment has become so hard to read it may not get read.

zeveb 10y ago

> I seriously want to punch a hipster every time I have to use an app that used to work and has now been designed to death. Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. I just want to sit folks down in a chair and ask them why they hell they broke something that needed no fixing. It wasn't a problem, and now it is. I want to quote the 90s classic Billy Madison at them: > Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. I read websites on a daily basis where image loading is broken without JavaScript, and where focusing the page takes over a second while it loads images — when HTML has supported images for over two decades. I read websites where even with every blocker I know of used at once can't keep them readable. I use software clearly designed to only be usable by a teenager with perfect vision and thirteen thumbs. Why do people do this?

Declanomous 10y ago
Because HTML isn't sexy.
- the_other 10y ago
  It freakin' is!! Well crafted, semantically rich markup can be a beauty to behold. It's a shame webapps have obscured the craft behind an opaque veil of nested `<div>` tags.
braveo 10y ago
> Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. Are you me? I'm the epitome of the old grumpy programmer. I have this love/hate relationship with technology. One the one hand I still love it, on the other hand I hate 99.9% of the tech I come into contact with because it's always shit for some reason or other.
- protomyth 10y ago

state 10y ago

As a designer, I agree completely. The problem is: interaction design really is a discipline in its absolute infancy. It's not graphic design. It's not engineering. It's not architecture. Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and start doing it. And the people who decide to ship shitty designs you're complaining about are more concerned with 'pageviews' or 'installs' (and in turn, their bonus) than actual usability. Compare the process by which an app or website design makes it out into the world to how a patch makes it into an open source project. Anyone can start programming, but to be accepted as a 'good' programmer you're inevitably vetted by other, better programmers. The ad-hoc peer-review of OSS actually works reasonably well. Most importantly: it can be very critical. Most designers I meet today have laughably thin skin. Try comparing the most successful projects on GitHub to those on Dribble. Dribble makes my skin crawl. Anyway, you're right. Most contemporary interaction design is absolutely awful. It's going to take time for the rules of the discipline to evolve. We'd probably see this improve a lot if the apps and sites we used weren't optimized for 'engagement'. They just look like slot machines designed by Portlandia characters.

knieveltech 10y ago
I would agree that interaction design for the web is in it's infancy inasmuch as it still displays a tendency to stick it's fork in the power outlet when left unsupervised. Otherwise I disagree strongly. All of the design lessons learned leading up to the .com implosion have had to be collectively re-learned at least twice (remember jello mold layouts? eyeroll) in the last 15 years. The root problem: designers either refuse to make peace with the fact that layout and control interfaces have been largely solved problems for close to 20 years now, or they fail miserably at conveying these limitations to potential clients.
- state 10y ago
  I'm not saying progress isn't happening — I'm saying that there's a big difference between a discipline and what interaction design is in 2016. I think these incremental steps are good, but it's going to take the equivalent of the Bauhaus to solve this problem. You need a strong foundational movement to anchor people's work. You're right that the problems have been solved, but they aren't being upheld very well.

ryuker16 10y ago

Id imagine designers are well aware of the issues of unreadable text for those with vision problems. Some of these apps are targeting a younger demographic exclusively. If you do stuff that pisses off 25% of your base or makes your app unusable, the complaints will be swift..... then management is on your ass. I run a few online store..... know exactly when the payment proccessing app or cart is having issues/ unusable becuase my customers will call me.

duncan_bayne 10y ago

> At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. That statement literally made me slightly irritated.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
No, I think when something angers us suddenly we do litterally become crazy (call it "mad" if you like). But only for a second or so. Sane people don't pound fists on desks because of what some lights on a screen are doing.

DrScump 10y ago

Designers are ruining software in general. Or, is it that designers making decisions in a vacuum are ruining software in general? One huge problem with interface design in industry segments for which I am a heavy/detailed user is that the major design choices are made by people who have never actually used the system in question and seek no input from those who have (e.g. Focus Groups, or simply observant-to-potentially-annoying-degrees users like myself). Case in point: ticket management and sales systems. Example 1: Ticketmaster's mobile resale interface that was replaced in 2014 or so. It was so stupid that if you were seeking, say, 3 tickets for an event, it would show you all listings offering 3 or more... even if you could not possibly purchase 3 from those sets! Many customers unknowingly bought more tickets than requested. Any knowledgeable user would have spotted that; I did in 10 minutes. It remained unchanged and without warning until the whole site was redone. Example 2: Tickets.com "My Tickets" account interface. In the general case, a given ticket has a barcode; they changed the mobile site to display the barcode when you drill down to ticket detail. Nice idea, since you could then just show your phone at the gate if you forgot your hard tickets. Anyway, also, in many cases, a ticketholder may want to make a note pertaining to a given ticket, e.g. "Given to Dave and Carolyn for anniversary; don't resell these, you idiot." So, in Spring of 2014 (I think), they decided to have the desktop system allow display of barcodes as well. Um, OK. However, they implemented this by having that overlay/replace the Notes, so therefore you could not only not see any given note, you could not even see that any note had ever been entered. See the hazard here? Poor Dave and Carolyn get shut out at the gate and embarrassed because you later resold their tickets because your careful notation was silently disposed of. Anyway, after I pointed that out to them, their solution was to roll back and give up on the barcode display feature altogether, rather than provide access to both. All of these problems (and many others) could have been avoided simply by inviting and encouraging feedback from your power users before tearing out your load-bearing walls of code.

braveo 10y ago

I haven't updated my iphone because I read the notes and one of the things it does is give me a "new and improved" maps application. The last time apple did that to me I stopped being able to turn randomize on and off in the music app (they did eventually bring it back, but I was floored that it was ever removed in the first place). The thing is, I have exactly 0 complaints about the map app. They can only make it worse. So I'm avoiding the entire update because I'm afraid they're going to do to the map app what they did to the music app.

SilasX 10y ago

Reddits starting to not-work -- when I hit the Back button, there's a noticeable lag for the page to re-render and then it's in the wrong place.

protomyth 10y ago

I listen to less music in my car because iTunes is such a pain in the butt to listen to your own music on the device. Audible has an acceptable interface so I listen to more audio books. I'm starting to think the people working on iTunes hate music. Never mind replacing the rating I spent years setting with a friggin like button.

thirdsun 10y ago
Although I think it's trivial to disable Apple Music's service in the app, thereby putting the focus on local content, you should try Ecoute, an alternative iOS music player that shows your music in an easy to understand grid, uses your existing library and is consistent with the play state of the default app so that you can use both apps interchangeably.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Disabling Apple Music doesn't fix the UI. Its truly horrible and uses the space poorly. I thought apps got rejected for duplicating functionality of provided apps? I think I shall try my hand one weekend at doing a classic music player.

AznHisoka 10y ago

Evernote is another one of those apps that used to just work and now their search box is almost frustratingly invisible and hard to find.

wott 10y ago

The cancer has now spread to each professional, industrial, each institutional site I use. One after another, they fell into the mobile-friendly but desktop-unfriendly and any-real-use-unfriendly fad: white space everywhere, flat design, white text; the amount of information on a screen has been divided by 2, by 3, by 4, I don't know, with wide spaces on the sides, with huge vertical space between each line of information, and each 'cell' containing fewer pieces of information. Oh, and bloody fat flat meaningless icons everywhere. Was it at least to add features? to improve features? No, there are less features, it takes more operations to achieve the same features, and there is a whole new set of bugs, while the previous set had been corrected along the years. Moreover, the result is generally more sluggish and ressource-consuming than the previous version.

viraptor 10y ago
There are practical reasons for it. My business website gets 98% mobile traffic. Pretty much anything I'll do about it, I'll do with mobile on mind. If the original design wasn't responsive by default, I don't think I'd even implement a different view for the desktop.
- DocTomoe 10y ago
  Maybe you get 98% mobile traffic because your site is unusable on desktops?
  - viraptor 10y ago
    No, it's a landing page and virtually all visits are from mobile devices. It's the first click of unique visitors - they didn't have the choice of the platform.

this-dang-guy 10y ago

Well, I like when people design for accessibility, like these guys: http://werebooks.org/robert-e-howard/guns-of-the-mountains/ http://werebooks.org/robert-e-howard/guns-of-the-mountains/ I mean, I can read that. On anything. Compared to most of the modern half-grey stuff, it's excellent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

JoshMnem 10y ago

> You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. The old, pre-design-goober Google Apps interface worked. I agree completely. Take a look at sites like Craig's List, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Reddit, and Hacker News. Fancy design doesn't make a website good, but it often makes a website bad. Two of the worst trends at the moment are bright colors and senseless animation.

yoz-y 10y ago

There is so much hate on the Apple Music app, but for me the reality is that it is the application where Apple has shown the most humility recently. On iOS they have back-pedalled a lot and now it has just huge text and large thumbnails. Visible local state indicators and huge buttons for control (albeit accessible from a not so obvious three dot button - which is large and red)

omnimus 10y ago

1. Whats good design is very differend thing for hard geek power users vs regular people. Complain as you want, there is thousands of ones like you and milions of the regular users. Products are made for the mass. 2. Good interface is not about amout of clicks or even time spend. Its about how easy it is to use. Its about pace and how much you have to think about it. 3. There are so many bad designers out there. Its same for programming, but you wont necessary see the bad code. The percentages will be similar. The pitfall is that self educated designers dont seem to see the depths of the problems. When you have good educated designer they almost forsee the future and are extremely aware of the big picture. Self educated programmers tend to be much more modest and aware of their capabilities because the skill is more visible. The design gets reduced to skin part of design which is marginal. 4. Design is what made all the ios android jobs. The startup boom is driven by design. Design is going to stay.

kaolti 10y ago

Let me defend designers here! While I agree we're overdoing design nowadays, I don't think it's just for the sake of it. I think the problem is there are too many goals a site has to achieve and being readable is just one of them. I would prefer to focus on specific group of people and cater to them, but very few businesses do this. Instead they want email subscribers, social engagement, comments, ads, CTA clicks, Sign ups, everything. So you end up with a mess, BUT the site satisfies measurable goals. Newsletter modals sure piss of a lot of people, but they work if your goal is getting subscriptions.

epeus 10y ago

If that's what you got from my article you didn't read it very well. Design is very important, and thoughtful designers will make good use of type. The cargo culting of design looks by people who don't understand them is much more of a problem.

BjoernKW 10y ago

It's not "designers" ruining software, it's wrong or misaligned incentives and goals. Most software isn't designed with (only) the user in mind or even just with respecting the user at all. With many free software products it's a commonly accepted view that you're not the customer but the product. In case of music apps licence restrictions are involved as well. It's probably not entirely wrong to say that apps like iTunes are in part designed to meet the requirements of lawyers, which in most cases won't align with those of the users. Moreover, developers are ruining software as well, just in different ways. Many developers focus on getting the internal design (design patterns, architecture, database design, whatever) of a software product right but tend to neglect the external, user-facing design because "UI is just a minor detail" real engineers can't be bothered with. Just have a look at applications like SoapUI or pgAdmin. They do a great job in terms of functionality but it's obvious that good usability wasn't exactly one of their requirements.

flamedoge 10y ago

4-4chan works!

jomamaxx 10y ago

"Designers are ruining software in general" Designers and Engineers collaborate to make products. Some suck, some are great. Blame bad design on bad designers, bad software on bad engs. Don't blame design or eng for existing.