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Many of Apple’s own apps are egregiously bad at reporting errors — as in, they don’t report them at all. When Airdrop doesn’t work, it just gets stuck. No time

by pavlov 4y ago

Many of Apple’s own apps are egregiously bad at reporting errors — as in, they don’t report them at all. When Airdrop doesn’t work, it just gets stuck. No timeout, no nothing. I guess that’s very clean from a UX writing perspective because you don’t even need an error message. But it’s extremely frustrating to the user. The iOS Family features suffer a similar lack of feedback. I toggle an app limit for my child and sometimes it just secretly doesn’t register on the server. I navigate back and forth to see the UI action hasn’t taken effect. (Often I wonder if anybody at Apple actually has kids because Family works incredibly poorly. 30-second delays are common. Notifications don’t come through. User flows go through confusing incorrect states. Etc. Feels like it’s maintained on leftover MobileMe infra by junior developers who have no idea why anyone would even use this product.)

tshaddox 4y ago
AirDrop is a particularly egregious outlier. It’s clear that something has gone very, very wrong with that feature. Not only with how unreliable it is, which is already bad enough, but with how clearly broken that basic state machine driving the UI is. Once it has gotten into a bad state, from my experience there’s no way to get it to succeed without restarting one or both iPhones.
thiht 4y ago
Apple Music too is awful with error messages. There's one time I wanted to add a song to my library, I clicked the button and nothing happened. Which is the exact behaviour you get when it succeeds. Except it didn't work and my song wasn't added to my library. I tried a few more times and it just didn't work for this particular song. Thinking I maybe "lost" dozens of songs because they weren't added to my library is one of the reasons I went back to Spotify
- aprilnya 4y ago
  > Which is the exact behaviour you get when it succeeds. If it successfully adds to library, it doesn’t just do nothing, it gives you a “Added to Library” thing
ragazzina 4y ago
>When Airdrop doesn’t work, it just gets stuck. No timeout, no nothing. Even when Airdrop works, it doesn't work. One "feature" of Airdrop is that if you try to airdrop something from your iPhone to your iPad, for example, but you had already airdropped it earlier, it won't give you ANY indication. It will make a nice ping sound, and just do nothing. This is so infuriating.
groestl 4y ago
I bet Apple Subscriptions is a popular product and makes them tons of money. Yet their admin UX is just as poor, I got instantly tiggered by your description.
threeseed 4y ago
Apple's policy has been to show error messages when the user can do something with the information. And in most cases trying again is the only thing they can do so it tends to be minimal. Also I suspect many of those issues you're seeing involve asynchronous behaviour which is a hard UX challenge to solve. You could send a push notification that an update has failed on the server but often the user has moved onto something else.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Even returning the most bog-standard message like "Try again (Error #12345)" would be immensely more helpful than having the UI simply do nothing, unclear on whether it's still working or not. Sure, async UI is hard, but the world's richest corporation with a reputation for UX excellence could afford to try at least.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    This. You have nailed it. And why does Support and Marketing push back on that idea? Because they don't like when a customer reaches Support and says "I got error #12345! What should I do?" They'd much rather the customer just shut up and go away however, the programmer who put 12345 in the code would dearly love to know that it was hit.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  An infinite loading animation and similar things are very ambiguous. Is my wifi connection bad right now? Is the OS acting up because I haven't rebooted the device in two months? Is a server down/unreachable? This wide range of possibilities is very frustrating because it often means you have a long, unsuccessful troubleshooting session ahead.
- perlgeek 4y ago
  When you have an error message you don't understand, at least you can google for it. If something simply doesn't work, there could be many possible underlying causes, and finding a list of possible errors and going through all of them is much more frustrating.

by pavlov 4y ago

tshaddox 4y ago

AirDrop is a particularly egregious outlier. It’s clear that something has gone very, very wrong with that feature. Not only with how unreliable it is, which is already bad enough, but with how clearly broken that basic state machine driving the UI is. Once it has gotten into a bad state, from my experience there’s no way to get it to succeed without restarting one or both iPhones.

thiht 4y ago

Apple Music too is awful with error messages. There's one time I wanted to add a song to my library, I clicked the button and nothing happened. Which is the exact behaviour you get when it succeeds. Except it didn't work and my song wasn't added to my library. I tried a few more times and it just didn't work for this particular song. Thinking I maybe "lost" dozens of songs because they weren't added to my library is one of the reasons I went back to Spotify

aprilnya 4y ago
> Which is the exact behaviour you get when it succeeds. If it successfully adds to library, it doesn’t just do nothing, it gives you a “Added to Library” thing

ragazzina 4y ago

>When Airdrop doesn’t work, it just gets stuck. No timeout, no nothing. Even when Airdrop works, it doesn't work. One "feature" of Airdrop is that if you try to airdrop something from your iPhone to your iPad, for example, but you had already airdropped it earlier, it won't give you ANY indication. It will make a nice ping sound, and just do nothing. This is so infuriating.

groestl 4y ago

I bet Apple Subscriptions is a popular product and makes them tons of money. Yet their admin UX is just as poor, I got instantly tiggered by your description.

threeseed 4y ago

Apple's policy has been to show error messages when the user can do something with the information. And in most cases trying again is the only thing they can do so it tends to be minimal. Also I suspect many of those issues you're seeing involve asynchronous behaviour which is a hard UX challenge to solve. You could send a push notification that an update has failed on the server but often the user has moved onto something else.

pavlov 4y ago
Even returning the most bog-standard message like "Try again (Error #12345)" would be immensely more helpful than having the UI simply do nothing, unclear on whether it's still working or not. Sure, async UI is hard, but the world's richest corporation with a reputation for UX excellence could afford to try at least.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  This. You have nailed it. And why does Support and Marketing push back on that idea? Because they don't like when a customer reaches Support and says "I got error #12345! What should I do?" They'd much rather the customer just shut up and go away however, the programmer who put 12345 in the code would dearly love to know that it was hit.
alpaca128 4y ago
An infinite loading animation and similar things are very ambiguous. Is my wifi connection bad right now? Is the OS acting up because I haven't rebooted the device in two months? Is a server down/unreachable? This wide range of possibilities is very frustrating because it often means you have a long, unsuccessful troubleshooting session ahead.
perlgeek 4y ago
When you have an error message you don't understand, at least you can google for it. If something simply doesn't work, there could be many possible underlying causes, and finding a list of possible errors and going through all of them is much more frustrating.