62 ms·

Apps Getting Worse

• JadeNB 5y ago
  > 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/20090828/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg 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.
• api 5y ago
  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.
  • z911empire 5y ago
    Bingo. Companies (and definitely, PMs) are focusing on engagement, retention, multi-channel, and recurring revenue - all part of modern business models.
• eplanit 5y ago
  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.
  • zorked 5y ago
    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.
    • eplanit 5y ago
      I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so long ago. It's great.
      • b3morales 5y ago
        FYI you can still get discs from Netflix if you want them; they just don't make it very easy to find. Go to dvd.com
      • blacksmith_tb 5y ago
        Hmm, they didn't discard it so much as bury it alive[1], though? 1: https://dvd.netflix.com/ https://dvd.netflix.com/
        • kencausey 5y ago
          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.
  • samb1729 5y ago
    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...
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Firefighters are heroes for fighting fires. The fire marshall who prevents fires is treated as a waste of money or a pest. Basically same thing here. Companies don’t promote those who preserve good things. They want new things.
  • gherkinnn 5y ago
    Maybe that’s not a bad idea. If we’d all be fire marshalls, our species would never have started cooking food.
  • planet-and-halo 5y ago
    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.
  • akudha 5y ago
    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.
• WhatIsDukkha 5y ago
  This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have no concept of what a swipe is and why it should do anything. Total chaos and brokenness for them and millions of others.
  • nebula8804 5y ago
    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.
• tpmx 5y ago
  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.
• pratio 5y ago
  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.
• j-pb 5y ago
  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.
  • kowlo 5y ago
    What was wrong with VSCode?
    • donatzsky 5y ago
      That it's an Electron app, mostly.
      • wayneftw 5y ago
        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.
        • dghlsakjg 5y ago
          I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you. I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines. Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.
• Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  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).
• withinboredom 5y ago
  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:
  • laurent92 5y ago
    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. Expect more with AI.
• oxinabox 5y ago
  > 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.
• mhb 5y ago
  There used to be an acceptable Scrabble app. No more.
  • flenserboy 5y ago
    It's amazingly horrible now, and there's no good alternative out there that I've found, now that Yahoo! has banished Literati to the nether realms.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • tacker2000 5y ago
    There is an iOS app called Word Master, it’s a quite decent replacement.
    • mhb 5y ago
      Yes, but no playing against online opponents.
• alkonaut 5y ago
  > ...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.
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• gambiting 5y ago
  >>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.
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    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.
  • ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
    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.
    • shp0ngle 5y ago
      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.
• enquon 5y ago
  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.
  • kristopolous 5y ago
    Software can be done. I used to get constantly brigaded by people on HN for claiming there's a point of completion. I believe people in general have come around to this idea more lately. It's possible to get to a point of "no further improvement, only maintenance"
• stormbrew 5y ago
  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.
• simonw 5y ago
  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.
  • Orou 5y ago
    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.
    • oakfr 5y ago
      Engagement metrics apply well beyond ad companies. Basically any product used by many users interacting with a UI is eligible.
      • ioseph 5y ago
        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.
      • _carbyau_ 5y ago
        But applications are tools to do a job. When I use a hammer I hit a nail, job done. Hammer can be laid down. I don't need my hammer to be frustrating to use, a nail-hitting-service subscription model, have social chat options... etc. You get the idea. Like the idea of a good butler, the best tool is one that removes a concern for the user, and doesn't take any more attention after that.
• blowski 5y ago
  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.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >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.
  • DanTheManPR 5y ago
    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.
  • avh02 5y ago
    > 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.
    • blowski 5y ago
      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.
• gpsx 5y ago
  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.
  • nirvdrum 5y ago
    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.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tootie 5y ago
  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.
• Negitivefrags 5y ago
  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!
  • wonnage 5y ago
    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...
    • malwarebytess 5y ago
      But it increases three and a half key metrics, including engagement!
    • ardit33 5y ago
      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.
      • epistasis 5y ago
• Laforet 5y ago
  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.
  • exporectomy 5y ago
    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.
    • gtyras2mrs 5y ago
      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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) 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)
      • exporectomy 5y ago
        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.
• smallerfish 5y ago
  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.
  • sixothree 5y ago
    I’ll file YouTube TV in that list. I have no idea what they are thinking. All I know is Google is crap at making software you can use.
• thaumasiotes 5y ago
  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.
  • mattmanser 5y ago
    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.
• herodotus 5y ago
  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.
• nmstoker 5y ago
  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!)
• masa331 5y ago
  Are PMs the only one to blame? What about developers "bored" with old and perfectly working stuff jumping to new shiny hype trains whenever possible?
  • wott 5y ago
    > What about developers [...] ? 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.
  • maficious 5y ago
    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.
    • maficious 5y ago
      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.
• egypturnash 5y ago
  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...
  • pantulis 5y ago
    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.
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid implementation it had without adding new features?
• dzonga 5y ago
  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.
  • maficious 5y ago
    Exactly. 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.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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.
  • ikiris 5y ago
    so what you're saying is, you aren't paying enough for people to want to stay working for you on your projects, and its hurting you in many ways.
  • over_bridge 5y ago
    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.
• aduitsis 5y ago
  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...
  • andrekandre 5y ago
    Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area. big sur right there: plain white/black windows with no divider line, yet you can only drag from the tiny sliver of the now non-visible bar at the top same thing happens when a dialog appears, you can only drag from that tiny little sliver even though the whole window is darkened... ugh
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thinkski 5y ago
  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.
  • oakfr 5y ago
    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.
• vmception 5y ago
  Kill the A/B test. 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
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  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).
• kristopolous 5y ago
  When institutions ascend in power they put too much faith into their own hubris. Software is no different
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  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.
  • robocat 5y ago
    > Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups" 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.
• shkkmo 5y ago
  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..
• jonplackett 5y ago
  I watched a ted talk ages ago and it stuck with me (Sorry I forget which, maybe this one https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi..., please correct me if I’m wrong) It said that researchers tried for ages, and at great expense, to find ‘the perfect’ pasta sauce and couldn’t do it. No-one would ever all agree. It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions and different people would find each 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!
  • orangegreen 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y This is the TED Talk you're talking about.
    • jonplackett 5y ago
      THANKS! Yes this is the one! (The incorrect Barry Schwartz one I posted is excellent too though!)
  • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    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?!
    • RachelF 5y ago
      nope, but big companies are more arrogant now, they know best, and the user has less choice. Skins might also get in the way of showing ads.
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  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.
• HumblyTossed 5y ago
  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.
• 1_2__5 5y ago
  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.
• Causality1 5y ago
  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.
• reilly3000 5y ago
  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.
• bob1029 5y ago
  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.
• CydeWeys 5y ago
  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.
• collinvandyck76 5y ago
  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.
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    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.
  • harry8 5y ago
    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.
• mastazi 5y ago
  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.
• rdiddly 5y ago
  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.
• IshKebab 5y ago
  > No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” What about the Nest PMs? That app hasn't changed at all in at least 3 years. Ok maybe it doesn't count if they've abandoned it.
• mastazi 5y ago
  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.
  • mattbk1 5y ago
    In a perfect world, all of those would work in an RSS reader.
    • mastazi 5y ago
      Yes, true. I wish Spotify artists/playlists or Youtube channels etc. had RSS. So, the next idea would be a service that scrapes contents and builds an RSS feed.
      • HKH2 5y ago
        YouTube does have RSS.
        • mastazi 5y ago
          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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111810
    • benrapscallion 5y ago
      NewsBlur can do this for YouTube videos.
• lajosbacs 5y ago
  Philips Hue app on iOS.
• RachelF 5y ago
  The article missed the worst regression in modern times: Windows 8 and then Windows 10. These operating systems are harder to use, have fewer features and are uglier than Windows 7. Hundreds of millions of people battle with Windows every day.
• dev_tty01 5y ago
  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.
  • noptd 5y ago
    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" ;)
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    I can recommend using one of the options mentioned here https://askubuntu.com/questions/16918/how-to-listen-to-audible-files https://askubuntu.com/questions/16918/how-to-listen-to-audib... 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.
• qwertox 5y ago
  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'm currently so angry at this.
  • BugWatch 5y ago
    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.
• foxrider 5y ago
  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.
  • lucb1e 5y ago
    > we lost the ability to say "no" to updates we... did?
    • spronkey 5y ago
      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.
      • BugWatch 5y ago
        This. So much this. I won't rant here again, but I have ranted about it here in the recent past. Having a dead man's switch in an app is particularly annoying, especially when the new version intentionally cripples the previous functionality.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  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.
• cfeliped 5y ago
  Enterprise stuff is also guilty of that. 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.
  • workinghard 5y ago
    AWS's UI not only sucks it takes so much time to get work done.
• ksec 5y ago
  > 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. Just reading this I feel bad for GrandMa.
• srcreigh 5y ago
  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 :-)
• throw7 5y ago
  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.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  "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.
• workinghard 5y ago
  I used to love old aws UI. current one sucks and wastes my time so much. I knew i could not change their minds so decided to change the cloud provider and using alternate services whenever and whereever i could. in my opinion, Whoever designed the current AWS UI should be fired.
• bluedino 5y ago
  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.
  • valzam 5y ago
    > now you have to play the video, watch 1-2 ads I think it's pretty obvious why they got rid of it...
• aronsemle 5y ago
  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.
• CoryAlexMartin 5y ago
  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.
• emodendroket 5y ago
  If people load up your app and it looks like it was last updated in 2007 they're going to be immediately put off.
• haolez 5y ago
  I've been feeling this with Evernote. The latest versions are so slow and unstable that I'm considering other products.
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  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.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    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.
• thoughtstheseus 5y ago
  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.
• mung 5y ago
  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.
• taeric 5y ago
  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."
• crateless 5y ago
  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.
  • atom058 5y ago
    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).
• rexreed 5y ago
  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.
• fukmbas 5y ago
  Too many MBAs
• nopeYouAreWrong 5y ago
  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..."
• dreamer7 5y ago
  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!!
  • vanilla_nut 5y ago
    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.
• hboon 5y ago
  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.
• aiisahik 5y ago
  absolutely agree with your gripes with the Economist app. I use it every day. Confuses the hell out of me. The old android app was terrible too because of frequent crashes.
• gordon_freeman 5y ago
  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".
• milkers 5y ago
  This made my day; `No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.”`
• tapland 5y ago
  The pocket cast redesign was like this for me. There is something especially sad about things getting worse over time.
• Razengan 5y ago
  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.
• rteuionwiv 5y ago
  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.
• rado 5y ago
  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. ?!
• ganafagol 5y ago
  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.
  • harry8 5y ago
    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.
• mro_name 5y ago
  Full ACK esp. for the part about promotion. 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. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_simplicity_sells https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_simplicity_sells
• agumonkey 5y ago
  Somehow an interesting lesson about how no field, even the latest most advanced pocket computing, is shielded from rot. Human + economy = cycles ;
• rutierut 5y ago
  One ridiculous example is Revolut. 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...
  • lordnacho 5y ago
    I was going to say just this. Where are my recent transactions? How do I change the currency? Where are my account details? How do I pay someone? All these things worked and were clear at some point in the past. Now you can still do them but first you have to click the wrong things a few times first before you find it. Purely UI though, the actual sending of money still seems to work.
    • rutierut 5y ago
      Right?? What kind of maniac is in charge of product there?
• lnxg33k1 5y ago
  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
• holoduke 5y ago
  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.
• npteljes 5y ago
  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.
• lvxferre 5y ago
  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.
• mourner 5y ago
  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.
• akho 5y ago
  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. Phones are a lost cause.
• nemacol 5y ago
  Jumping on the band wagon 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.
• surfingdino 5y ago
  Job security trumps UX every time, because if there s no need to change something there is no need to keep the team to implement that change.
• surfingdino 5y ago
  YouTube app on Android. You watch a video you like but accidentally tap on a different one. Try going back to the previous one now...
  • perryizgr8 5y ago
    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.
    • higeorge13 5y ago
      It seems like tinder-inspired design. I have missed so many times having a back button in yt, that i would literally pay for it.
• HeavyStorm 5y ago
  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.
• mxuribe 5y ago
  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)
• ammar_x 5y ago
  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... Very interesting discussion here.