6 ms·

> Why do they keep messing with the UI? UX folks don't get paid to leave things alone.

by GiorgioG 5y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.
  - saurik 5y ago
    Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.
    - FridgeSeal 5y ago
      Bonuses paid to design teams that are a direct function of the length between unprompted UI adjustments and redesigns? Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design. This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.
    - beamatronic 5y ago
      Another one would be paying Wall Street bankers not to create innovative banking products, like synthetic CDO's
- blondin 5y ago
  this is so true! apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one! please leave the podcasts app alone.
  - vehemenz 5y ago
    Interesting. The Podcasts app was a disaster when it was released. I honestly can’t imagine how it could have gotten worse. I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  It's definitely a big problem with software. This "need to constantly pay developers" is part of the justification for moving towards subscription payment instead of one-time payment. The logic goes: One-time payment won't pay for future changes, and developers are always making changes, and they need to be paid for. But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it. But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Funny, I was just thinking to myself that maybe a paid subscription Windows could be a solution to undesired UI change. Because it would take away the lure of the upgrade sale licence. 64 bit w2k? Yeah, I'd totally pay for that. If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.
    - skeletal88 5y ago
      Windows is not selling upgrades anymore, 8 to 10 was a free upgrade
      - usrusr 5y ago
        8 too? I was going to write something about this, particularly in how that's the reason why I don't really disagree with GP despite pondering the exact opposite "what if". But the sudden appearance of an 11 that nobody asked for gives me the impression that the culture that was fostered on the paid upgrade is still very much alive. Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.
- tnzm 5y ago
  What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?
- johnisgood 5y ago
  Yeah, it is seriously worth thinking about.
toiletfuneral 5y ago
I’ve been doing UI for 20+ years and most of what I’ve worked on is determined by marketing & engineering. I understand & totally sympathize with not liking the results, but in my experience the designers rarely choose what (ui) problems need to get solved. Also I have never worked in an org that shipped “the design”, it’s inevitably compromised by high level management’s personal feelings or lack of engineering attention to detail (I don’t blame eng’s for this, anytime the project schedule gets tight, they immediately cut resources to UI/UX). Anyway, I agree most updated UI’s fail to deliver improvements to end users and let me tell you how shitty it feels to take the blame for stuff you didn’t like either.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Whilst apple also have its share of this ui change (like keyboard butterfly or no hole in portable etc.), I still think their design team actually work to solve sone user problem. Not just marketing or engineering… I cannot be sure. Just that I thought. Hence not all in the dark side.
imwillofficial 5y ago
There is plenty of other UI things to be touched.
abledon 5y ago
Cough spotify
- k12sosse 5y ago
  Heh. I used uBlock origin to hide all the podcast elements in Spotify web for a clean desktop web-based Spotify. Every time I open up the app on my phone, I die a little.
- 1ark 5y ago
  Spotify was pretty snappy in the early days, I guess a decade ago now. Current iteration boots up in 3 minutes and is unnavigable. Went back to Winamp and occasional usage of the web player.
- koziserek 5y ago
  There’s a solution, a client software called Psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst
- dartharva 5y ago
  I largely believe the Spotify folks keep making changes in their apps solely to break the experiences of those who're running cracked (ad-blocked) builds.
  - bambataa 5y ago
    They seem to be happy breaking everyone else’s experience too though. Even basic functionality fails quite often for me. The absolute worst is the macOS Music app, which doesn’t seem to allow basic things such as dragging from search results to playlists.
robbedpeter 5y ago
Ux is snake oil nonsense and has no place in software design. They create change for the sake of change and dumb everything down as if complexity were a sin.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  I feel like this takes it too far. Complexity may not be a sin, but it is possible to make things much more cohesive. "Modern" UX does involve a lot of dumb antipatterns and things that break usability, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Needless complexity is a sin. But easy/difficult is an orthogonal axis to simple/complex.
  - lolcat_cowsay 5y ago
    Should inherent complexity be simplified?

> Why do they keep messing with the UI? UX folks don't get paid to leave things alone.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.

dylan604 5y ago
Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.
- saurik 5y ago
  Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.
  - FridgeSeal 5y ago
    Bonuses paid to design teams that are a direct function of the length between unprompted UI adjustments and redesigns? Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design. This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    Another one would be paying Wall Street bankers not to create innovative banking products, like synthetic CDO's
blondin 5y ago
this is so true! apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one! please leave the podcasts app alone.
- vehemenz 5y ago
  Interesting. The Podcasts app was a disaster when it was released. I honestly can’t imagine how it could have gotten worse. I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.
ryandrake 5y ago
It's definitely a big problem with software. This "need to constantly pay developers" is part of the justification for moving towards subscription payment instead of one-time payment. The logic goes: One-time payment won't pay for future changes, and developers are always making changes, and they need to be paid for. But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it. But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Funny, I was just thinking to myself that maybe a paid subscription Windows could be a solution to undesired UI change. Because it would take away the lure of the upgrade sale licence. 64 bit w2k? Yeah, I'd totally pay for that. If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.
  - skeletal88 5y ago
    Windows is not selling upgrades anymore, 8 to 10 was a free upgrade
    - usrusr 5y ago
      8 too? I was going to write something about this, particularly in how that's the reason why I don't really disagree with GP despite pondering the exact opposite "what if". But the sudden appearance of an 11 that nobody asked for gives me the impression that the culture that was fostered on the paid upgrade is still very much alive. Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.
tnzm 5y ago
What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?
johnisgood 5y ago
Yeah, it is seriously worth thinking about.

toiletfuneral 5y ago

I’ve been doing UI for 20+ years and most of what I’ve worked on is determined by marketing & engineering. I understand & totally sympathize with not liking the results, but in my experience the designers rarely choose what (ui) problems need to get solved. Also I have never worked in an org that shipped “the design”, it’s inevitably compromised by high level management’s personal feelings or lack of engineering attention to detail (I don’t blame eng’s for this, anytime the project schedule gets tight, they immediately cut resources to UI/UX). Anyway, I agree most updated UI’s fail to deliver improvements to end users and let me tell you how shitty it feels to take the blame for stuff you didn’t like either.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Whilst apple also have its share of this ui change (like keyboard butterfly or no hole in portable etc.), I still think their design team actually work to solve sone user problem. Not just marketing or engineering… I cannot be sure. Just that I thought. Hence not all in the dark side.

imwillofficial 5y ago

There is plenty of other UI things to be touched.

abledon 5y ago

Cough spotify

k12sosse 5y ago
Heh. I used uBlock origin to hide all the podcast elements in Spotify web for a clean desktop web-based Spotify. Every time I open up the app on my phone, I die a little.
1ark 5y ago
Spotify was pretty snappy in the early days, I guess a decade ago now. Current iteration boots up in 3 minutes and is unnavigable. Went back to Winamp and occasional usage of the web player.
koziserek 5y ago
There’s a solution, a client software called Psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst
dartharva 5y ago
I largely believe the Spotify folks keep making changes in their apps solely to break the experiences of those who're running cracked (ad-blocked) builds.
- bambataa 5y ago
  They seem to be happy breaking everyone else’s experience too though. Even basic functionality fails quite often for me. The absolute worst is the macOS Music app, which doesn’t seem to allow basic things such as dragging from search results to playlists.

robbedpeter 5y ago

Ux is snake oil nonsense and has no place in software design. They create change for the sake of change and dumb everything down as if complexity were a sin.

approxim8ion 5y ago
I feel like this takes it too far. Complexity may not be a sin, but it is possible to make things much more cohesive. "Modern" UX does involve a lot of dumb antipatterns and things that break usability, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Needless complexity is a sin. But easy/difficult is an orthogonal axis to simple/complex.
- lolcat_cowsay 5y ago
  Should inherent complexity be simplified?