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Well, the menu and search were always context-dependent from what I remember (ie, on devices that used on-screen buttons as opposed to hardware buttons, they we

Well, the menu and search were always context-dependent from what I remember (ie, on devices that used on-screen buttons as opposed to hardware buttons, they were only present when the app requested them to). This created a situation where the buttons were sort of weirdly sized and bolted onto the side of the standard three button layout. This wasn't ideal- and I don't recall an app that made particularly good use of them. > Now, everything is different and you never know how to popup a menu (hamburger menu? where? or is it a swipe?), even though it is always the same functionally. Well if it's a hamburger menu than you can see it, and drag out sidebars can be checked with a drag in the middle of the screen (but not from the left edge lest you activate the back gesture), so it's pretty quick to figure out. However I will nominate the Soundcloud app as the single worst app design I have seen when it comes to menuing. It is absolutely atrocious, and actually uses none of the above options. I'll leave it as an exercise to go try it out if anyone wants to laugh at bad app design (sorry if anyone who worked on it is reading this).

pigcat 3y ago
Can you expand on the design sins of the Soundcloud app? I use it a lot and have never noticed anything particularly funky. I'm on iOS.
- rezonant 3y ago
  I hope it's better on iOS. On Android, you have 5 tabs at the bottom: Home, Feed, Search, Library and Upgrade. Having Upgrade in the same place that nearly all other apps have a Profile/Settings tab constantly trips me up. I'm actually a Next Pro subscriber too, so it feels a bit shitty to devote so much of the experience to extracting more money from me. And... well let's look at some user tasks: Task 1: Go to the app's settings Settings is only found on one of these tabs! Which one would you guess? That's right! It's Library! Task 2: View your SoundCloud notifications Notifications is also only found on one of these tabs. Which one? That's right! It's Home. Task 3: Start casting Casting, perplexingly, is offered on the Home, Search, and Library tabs, but in different locations. -- This is exacerbated because each tab remembers your drill down independently, because after you leave a tab on a particular drill down, and you return attempting to access one of the top options, they won't be there any more. That upper right corner is the second most likely place to have a profile/settings menu, and they technically do have it there, but it's split up bizarrely and completely inconsistent throughout the app :*-( I constantly have to retrain my brain to deal with these things, and it's really only a challenge in this app. There are some other smaller things that annoy me, like how the "Showing last 7 days" time range selector in Insights (for artists) opens a full screen picker, but if you use the Back button in the upper left or you use the back gesture, it skips back to the previous page instead of closing the full page selector. I'm sure there are more but honestly just these are enough to irritate me whenever I use it. All this said, there are a lot of cool parts of the app-- the scrubbable waveform in the playback drawer is really slick, and though tapping on the large background to pause isn't the most discoverable, it's also very cool that they managed to have zero buttons on this view and for it still to be quite capable. It's also really responsive and not very error prone to open and close the drawer by gesture, even though swipe left/right are track skip gestures as well. And Soundcloud's "Playback History" is something I wish literally any other audio/video app would add. But I just lost how to access it while I was navigating around. It's in there somewhere.

pigcat 3y ago

Can you expand on the design sins of the Soundcloud app? I use it a lot and have never noticed anything particularly funky. I'm on iOS.

rezonant 3y ago
I hope it's better on iOS. On Android, you have 5 tabs at the bottom: Home, Feed, Search, Library and Upgrade. Having Upgrade in the same place that nearly all other apps have a Profile/Settings tab constantly trips me up. I'm actually a Next Pro subscriber too, so it feels a bit shitty to devote so much of the experience to extracting more money from me. And... well let's look at some user tasks: Task 1: Go to the app's settings Settings is only found on one of these tabs! Which one would you guess? That's right! It's Library! Task 2: View your SoundCloud notifications Notifications is also only found on one of these tabs. Which one? That's right! It's Home. Task 3: Start casting Casting, perplexingly, is offered on the Home, Search, and Library tabs, but in different locations. -- This is exacerbated because each tab remembers your drill down independently, because after you leave a tab on a particular drill down, and you return attempting to access one of the top options, they won't be there any more. That upper right corner is the second most likely place to have a profile/settings menu, and they technically do have it there, but it's split up bizarrely and completely inconsistent throughout the app :*-( I constantly have to retrain my brain to deal with these things, and it's really only a challenge in this app. There are some other smaller things that annoy me, like how the "Showing last 7 days" time range selector in Insights (for artists) opens a full screen picker, but if you use the Back button in the upper left or you use the back gesture, it skips back to the previous page instead of closing the full page selector. I'm sure there are more but honestly just these are enough to irritate me whenever I use it. All this said, there are a lot of cool parts of the app-- the scrubbable waveform in the playback drawer is really slick, and though tapping on the large background to pause isn't the most discoverable, it's also very cool that they managed to have zero buttons on this view and for it still to be quite capable. It's also really responsive and not very error prone to open and close the drawer by gesture, even though swipe left/right are track skip gestures as well. And Soundcloud's "Playback History" is something I wish literally any other audio/video app would add. But I just lost how to access it while I was navigating around. It's in there somewhere.