5 ms·

The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se

• mostlysimilar 4y ago
  Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe software has to be this basic. As software has become mainstream I think we've created a self-reinforcing myth that it has to be simplistic for people to want it. I think we can afford to ask users to think for a couple of seconds about the interface they're using.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    Same for Netflix. A basic UI like Popcorn time is all that most people need. Instead we get a situation where both the UI and content is randomized, constantly shuffled. The simplest of use cases are barely supported or completely missing. It's not just incompetence, they are intentional dark patterns. Netflix doesn't want you to structurally browse their catalog in easy ways as you might conclude that it falls short. So it throws random things at you, auto-playing videos, etc. Giving the inflated impression that there's always something interesting for you. Likewise, user reviews, an absolutely basic community feature, is simply not there. Because if it would be there, and assuming they are fair reviews, you could filter by rating. Which once again could reveal a lack of quality content. Best to mask that. It's sad to consider that the output of hundreds of engineers and some very high-tech data science leads to something a single engineer in mum's basement could do better.
  • eduction 4y ago
    >There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. Except for the extremely useful functionality of putting a large percentage of the world's music at your fingertips ready for instant listening. Spotify also makes curated playlists ("This Is _[Artist Name]__" playlists), artist pages that show their most popular tracks and discographies, offers professionally mixed playlists, social sharing of playlists, sharing of songs, and works on mobile, desktop, web, and tablets. It also lets you have a library made up of both local files and Spotify licensed files on the network. It has selective download of songs you want to listen to offline (even licensed songs). It has both regular playlists and ad hoc queues. You can make playlists public, share with certain friends, share with all friends, make them collaboratively editable or not. It's actually kind of a staggering achievement. I get that the player could be better, and maybe Winamp had some features it should steal, but let's appreciate that it has solved many, many problems that no one was addressing 20 years ago. (And I must say, I can't conceive how Winamp could have had 10x the functionality as Spotify or Apple Music - this seems quite an overstatement, as someone who used it c2000 and uses Spotify now. Maybe you meant it had more of the functionality that you care about (presuming you only care about listening to files you own and have downloaded).)
    • stavros 4y ago
      I agree with the GP. Yes, the infrastructure is great, but the client itself is trash. Winamp consumed 1% of my CPU twenty years ago, Spotify consumes 10% now. Not only do they mostly do the same thing, but Winamp did much more. This is a major, major regression, that we have machines thousands of times faster but the software is an order of magnitude slower and more resource-hungry than back then on the much faster machines.
      • eduction 4y ago
        You agree that Winamp has 10x the functionality of Spotify?
        • stavros 4y ago
          Yes, easily. Just the plugins alone are easily 10x the functionality.
  • solarkraft 4y ago
    > Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? Yup, but note that things can be both simple and powerful. I think there's also for some reason the expectation that people want fewer features on mobile than on desktop devices.
  • ioseph 4y ago
    As a frontend dev I blame it entirely on the "co-design" fad and the rise of A/B testing. When I started 10 years ago the idea was that a designer can objectively produce a good UX using their skills (of course validating it with real users). These days it seems to be treated more like social science with never ending broad discovery work to answer questions like "How do our users feel"? This stuff is important but I feel is often used to justify decisions poorly compared to a more quantitate approach. But largely I think A/B testing is to blame, we get more conversions this way (or maybe with spotify user's listen to more tracks / have longer sessions with this particular interface). Often the metric measured is profit driven rather than user enjoyment as well.
• unsupp0rted 4y ago
  It's very hard to come up with a media player interface that is better than Winamp 25 years ago.