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I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface cha

by dm270 4y ago

I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the changes really made it worse. Thinking about movie streaming apps maybe that's on purpose to make everything require just a couple more clicks. But this is music streaming. Most ppl wanna turn it on and then it sits in your pocket.

californical 4y ago
Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …YES, it’s another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit! With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen. There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.
- arpanetus 4y ago
  Is Tidal's UI lightweight(like it's not Electron)? What about the songs? Are you satisfied with the songs library? I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very strange reason.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I used Tidal for a while; it's mostly the same as Spotify in terms of UX. They also use Electron. The song library is similar. Back in the day I use Rdio, which had a pretty good UI; unfortunately they shut down.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  Tidal doesn’t even let me play with it for a while to see if I like it to subscribe…
  - gen3 4y ago
    They have an ad supported free tier now
corney91 4y ago
I gave up on my Spotify subscription of 13 years because of this. The interface kept changing and making it more difficult to use. All I want is to listen to albums and Daily Mixes, and keeping up with all their unrelated app changes became too frustrating. I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple interfaces.
wonderbore 4y ago
AB is the worst. I don't know how long it's been going on, but on YouTube’s homepage it keeps alternating between "Hover to expand video and see Watch Later button" and the regular always-visible Watch Later button. https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku Pick one already.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I think you can turn off that expand-on-hover popup in the YouTube settings. I found it super annoying and I was surprised it was even an option.
  - AuthConnectFail 4y ago
    Weird, I actually love that feature. Especially on my browser if there are multiple videos on my feed that I wanted to watch then hated open multiple tabs for them and in most cases I never ended up going there or bloating the number of tabs open.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      Oh, I use the Watch Later feature all the time, just not the autoplay-muted-on-hover popup.
  - wonderbore 4y ago
    Great! I can also disable "in-video info cards" which are the user-picked videos overlaid on the video, almost always covering the last few seconds of whatever I'm watching unless the video has a 10s ending card. Super annoying.
popcorncowboy 4y ago
This is what happens when you let "the data" drive design. The data becomes an abstraction between your users and your goals, leading to a paint by numbers exercise where the only thing that matters is getting some arbitrary metric to go up. The results are quite predictable: numbers that go up, and UX that goes way, way down. Eventually this falls over because your model ends up in local maxima.
grishka 4y ago
Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff they're A/B testing, too — wording, button colors, bug fixes, animation durations... I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.
- lightbendover 4y ago
  Honestly, blame humans. If our species wasn't susceptible to changing our behavior due to these seemingly-inconsequential changes, A/B testing would return to a more sane baseline; however, these "silly" changes (when statistically proven to be effective long-term) can lead to 8 figure shifts in megacorp revenue so they will continue to be made.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids". I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    Ig is the perfect example of an app that optimizes for engagement while providing a really buggy and low-quality experience

by dm270 4y ago

californical 4y ago

Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …YES, it’s another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit! With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen. There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.

arpanetus 4y ago
Is Tidal's UI lightweight(like it's not Electron)? What about the songs? Are you satisfied with the songs library? I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very strange reason.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I used Tidal for a while; it's mostly the same as Spotify in terms of UX. They also use Electron. The song library is similar. Back in the day I use Rdio, which had a pretty good UI; unfortunately they shut down.
behnamoh 4y ago
Tidal doesn’t even let me play with it for a while to see if I like it to subscribe…
- gen3 4y ago
  They have an ad supported free tier now

corney91 4y ago

I gave up on my Spotify subscription of 13 years because of this. The interface kept changing and making it more difficult to use. All I want is to listen to albums and Daily Mixes, and keeping up with all their unrelated app changes became too frustrating. I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple interfaces.

wonderbore 4y ago

AB is the worst. I don't know how long it's been going on, but on YouTube’s homepage it keeps alternating between "Hover to expand video and see Watch Later button" and the regular always-visible Watch Later button. https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku Pick one already.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
I think you can turn off that expand-on-hover popup in the YouTube settings. I found it super annoying and I was surprised it was even an option.
- AuthConnectFail 4y ago
  Weird, I actually love that feature. Especially on my browser if there are multiple videos on my feed that I wanted to watch then hated open multiple tabs for them and in most cases I never ended up going there or bloating the number of tabs open.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Oh, I use the Watch Later feature all the time, just not the autoplay-muted-on-hover popup.
- wonderbore 4y ago
  Great! I can also disable "in-video info cards" which are the user-picked videos overlaid on the video, almost always covering the last few seconds of whatever I'm watching unless the video has a 10s ending card. Super annoying.

popcorncowboy 4y ago

This is what happens when you let "the data" drive design. The data becomes an abstraction between your users and your goals, leading to a paint by numbers exercise where the only thing that matters is getting some arbitrary metric to go up. The results are quite predictable: numbers that go up, and UX that goes way, way down. Eventually this falls over because your model ends up in local maxima.

grishka 4y ago

Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff they're A/B testing, too — wording, button colors, bug fixes, animation durations... I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.

lightbendover 4y ago
Honestly, blame humans. If our species wasn't susceptible to changing our behavior due to these seemingly-inconsequential changes, A/B testing would return to a more sane baseline; however, these "silly" changes (when statistically proven to be effective long-term) can lead to 8 figure shifts in megacorp revenue so they will continue to be made.
solarkraft 4y ago
It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids". I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  Ig is the perfect example of an app that optimizes for engagement while providing a really buggy and low-quality experience