[HN Gopher] Apps Getting Worse
___________________________________________________________________
Apps Getting Worse
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 308 points
Date : 2021-08-08 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tbray.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
| mastazi wrote:
| There should be a new category of apps, where you can still get
| the contents offered by a given service (Spotify, Youtube, your
| favourite news service etc.) while at the same time not using the
| built in UI.
|
| For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that
| will show you every new video published by channels you choose.
| No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be
| interested in".
|
| You could do the same with Spotify or with one of those terrible
| news websites.
|
| Some examples of this already exist: Nitter (shows Twitter
| contents), Invido.us (shows Youtube contents) but they are not
| mainstream and not particularly polished.
|
| Also, I'm aware that this concept when applied to news websites
| results in something that is terribly close to an RSS reader.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| In a perfect world, all of those would work in an RSS reader.
| tpmx wrote:
| My experience: It's much more common that the dramatic decline
| starts when the original creator(s)/product owner(s) leave the
| company, rather than when some product manager later on decides
| to go rogue.
| pratio wrote:
| I can only comment on The Economist App, the experience has
| indeed worsened over time. Simple features like searching an
| article, bookmarking it going back to where you left off etc.
|
| Similar behavior I feel among other apps as well.
|
| - New features aren't that useful. (bells and whistles because
| everyone has it, so should we)
|
| - Old features aren't maintained or getting worse with each
| release
|
| - Apps seem to be getting slower.
|
| - They don't seem to be completely native (probably using
| incorrect terminology). When you minimize an app and go back to
| it, it'll refresh the page. You were reading something?, thought
| you found an interesting product and paused to look up something?
|
| I don't mind paying a subscription either. If I'm using an app
| regularly, it needs to be maintained over OS versions but so many
| apps are getting worse.
| j-pb wrote:
| The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that
| killed it.
|
| The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios
| are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate,
| Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great
| software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for
| Mac software.
|
| But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you
| into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts,
| where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it
| so big, that your have several million customers.
|
| It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped
| the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for
| quality anymore.
|
| I've recently switched from VSCode to Panics Nova, and for a very
| brief moment I felt like I was back in the old days of Mac Os X
| where things just worked, and where I felt at home with my OS,
| without constantly waiting for a better alternative to come
| along.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Wow thank you for that list of developers. I looked through all
| of them and found some great apps.
|
| Is there some place that catalogs development companies that
| are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support
| these guys and keep them going.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Other companies: Omni Group (mentioned elsewhere), Bare Bones
| Software. There's also this page [0] which has a few names --
| some unfortunately which don't exist anymore (Ambrosia! sigh)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software
| _co...
| b3morales wrote:
| Most of the developers you mentioned are still around and still
| cranking. Panic and Rogue Amoeba in particular. Others have
| emerged, though there's a lot of crossover with iOS these days,
| since people want their data available across their devices.
| Bear and Things come to mind; Dash by Kapeli; The Archive;
| Kaleidoscope has been reinvigorated by a company that seems to
| know what they're doing; Alfred; Paw, Proxie, and Proxyman...
| they are out there.
| kowlo wrote:
| What was wrong with VSCode?
| donatzsky wrote:
| That it's an Electron app, mostly.
| wayneftw wrote:
| That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same
| exact experience on every platform... including when you
| embed it's components within a web app which is very
| useful.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you.
|
| I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron
| apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly
| the same on both machines.
|
| Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting
| config file.
| nimvlaj30 wrote:
| It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life,
| honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would
| expect from the same software written natively.
| burlesona wrote:
| For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and
| text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The
| VS Code ecosystem is superb though.
| reaperducer wrote:
| For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too
| long is a recipe for kernel panic.
|
| I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure
| Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20%
| chance I'm going to have to reboot that day.
|
| Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real
| program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes
| to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being
| wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache
| at the last moment, just in case it would be used before
| then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single
| entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program
| holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache
| to allow a different program to use the memory. If the
| single program is the OS, great. If there's a single large
| program using RAM such as a browser, then it's still
| workable but not so great. If you have more than one
| program each trying to eat 80% of the RAM available, then
| you're in a world of hurt.
|
| And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and
| only important program running on the computer, which is
| how we get into the situation we're in.
| hokumguru wrote:
| I think the most infuriating thing is azure containers
| don't really work with standard FTP clients like transmit
|
| But as long as the product is "good enough "we will see
| this trend more as most consumers of apps care more about
| features than performance
| _fzslm wrote:
| how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with
| it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS
| Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very
| attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.
| andrekandre wrote:
| not the op, but...
|
| i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development
| (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server)
|
| it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and
| smooth for the most part
|
| my only concerns are
|
| 1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when
| will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins)
|
| 2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels"
| different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something
| i notice
|
| 3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting,
| dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little
| heavy for that (in the ui sense)
|
| 4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error
| messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to
| fix, duplicate errors reported etc) ---
|
| its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it
| could!
| bingidingi wrote:
| personally I found Nova to be kind of old school interface-
| wise... it's good, but I've grown too used to IDEs like
| Atom/VS/etc, which seem more minimal on the surface
|
| Of course you can customize it and do whatever you want, but
| I found it hard to find a reason to switch outside of my
| affinity for the people at Panic (and I've got plenty of
| other ways to give them money).
| WA wrote:
| There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on
| the Mac, but for iOS.
|
| In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more
| than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents.
| Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of
| subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and
| improved over many years.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| I'm just curious because I'm not a heavy mobile app user. The
| only apps on my phone right now that I feel really good are
| free. I paid for many apps but most haven't been updated in
| years and have a lot to improve. Where are the good apps?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even
| more than they used to.
|
| I'm willing to pay for quality. The main problem is
| convincing me of the quality before buying.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces
| you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer
| handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app
| is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers._
|
| Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup,
| Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are
| not 99ct and do just fine...
| sombremesa wrote:
| > The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software
| studios are over.
|
| Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat,
| I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple
| without considering the decisions these companies made for
| themselves.
|
| Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and
| still expecting to succeed as a business.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Electron has killed it. Fast browsers have killed it. Saas
| killed it.
|
| There are many problems with Apple's stores, but I don't see
| how this is one.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I can't say this view has it _entirely_ backwards because
| part of the phenomenon _is_ due to the strengths of the web
| today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the
| argument is that native Apple software _could_ , but no
| longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and
| Electron.
|
| I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if
| I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use
| Electron. Here's why:
|
| - I don't feel the Mac's UX is great these days. If my app
| doesn't benefit from a consistent and elegant GUI, I might as
| well do it with web tech.
|
| - I can't keep up with Xcode and the OS changing constantly.
| There was a time when you'd get a couple years between OS
| upgrades, when Apple's documentation wasn't (entirely)
| useless
|
| - Desktop software on the Mac involves so much complexity
| today (eg: sandboxing, certificates, iCloud, icon formats and
| sizes, etc) that I don't want to deal with it
|
| The Apple ecosystem doesn't offer enough advantages for me
| anymore to warrant the effort.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've
| swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to
| pay for quality anymore._
|
| It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You
| get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used
| the phrase in its television advertising.
|
| Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a
| "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better.
| When it only sometimes is.
|
| You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the
| warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included"
| because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies
| pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and
| somehow we thought it was OK.
|
| There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart.
| Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization.
|
| In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and
| support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't
| always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of
| furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was
| able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will
| last the rest of our lives.
|
| But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things
| like household basics.
| zepto wrote:
| This has nothing to do with anything Apple has done other than
| expand from serving a niche of self-identified tasteful
| customers into serving half the planet.
|
| It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful
| customers who would for good software, all you had to do was
| target the Mac. Obviously it's harder now.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| It's not about # of customers. Even apps with billions of users
| can survey those users, or use some sort of a/b testing to figure
| out what impact any change to a product will have. The issue is
| just that sometimes a change might be good for new users only, or
| might be good for some metric the business cares about that you
| don't (ie maybe the Economist needed daily actives instead of
| weekly actives for some reason so they launched daily news). Not
| saying the changes are always net positive, but I don't think
| it's a simple as "they want to get promoted and can't talk to all
| their users".
|
| Also, as much as I love AWS as a service overall, it's actual
| user experience is pretty terrible and I wish it did change over
| time (for the better).
| withinboredom wrote:
| My wife asks me why this happens all the time. This is the way
| better answer that I usually give her: "money." So I'll be
| passing along this blog post to her.
|
| There are many apps that get worse over the years. I literally
| don't know how to use most apps these days and I don't care to.
| On an app we use for work, I went irate that a button I used
| often mysteriously disappeared. A few months later, I was having
| a beer with one of the devs that works on it and it came up. He
| laughed and said that 40% of users had the same reaction I did.
| It was less than 50% so they shipped the change. :sigh:
| laurent92 wrote:
| The good thing about data-driven management is, they have the
| figures!
|
| Meanwhile in the growth-hacking section, they'll raise an
| project proving that they could get 40% more users if they had
| a single specific button, if only these were not the users we
| betrayed in the first place.
|
| Expect more with AI.
| aduitsis wrote:
| A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of
| platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as
| regards their UI, with the usual set of UI widgets such as text
| boxes, dropdown lists, radio boxes, buttons, etc. These widgets
| are available in any toolkit or browser in highly polished and
| performant implementations that require very little from the
| developer in terms of fiddling with the UI.
|
| So it completely boggles the mind that, during the last decade,
| we are witnessing an unbelievable onslaught to any sane UI
| convention that people have come to expect. At the top of my
| head:
|
| - No accessibility at all, even though there are extensive sets
| of standards fully implemented by the UI toolkit. - No scrollbars
| at all. Even worse, scrollbars that don't behave quite right.
|
| - Ugly styling that doesn't follow even the most basic modicum of
| guidelines crystalized around the 80s.
|
| - Text boxes and other widgets that have hidden weird behaviours,
| or are generally ridiculously slow.
|
| - UI widgets that are badly sized and don't correctly follow the
| regular zoom controls.
|
| - Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging
| them from a specific small and narrow area.
|
| - Trivial apps for which the browser has to download megabytes of
| js and raise the CPU to a point that the fans need to start
| spinning.
|
| - Cryptic icons that don't have any semantic connection with what
| they are supposed to accomplish.
|
| - My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where
| originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they
| keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit
| decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact
| with it.
|
| - Phone button menus that have an unknown size below the bottom
| of the screen and there is no visible clue how many icons below
| the bottom are not visible.
|
| We are possibly very near hitting rock bottom in terms of UI in
| 2021, which (oddly enough) means that there is bound to be a
| renaissance of some sort as regards those things. After the
| middle ages many turned to the classical antiquity for
| inspiration. Drooling over the skeuomorphic UIs of the original
| iPhone and the pseudo-3d toolkits of the 1990s...
| Causality1 wrote:
| Ex File Explorer Pro remains the best file manager for Android.
| It's the only one that treats network shares as seamlessly as
| local file folders and support tabbed folder windows.
| Unfortunately if you want to use it you have to get an APK from
| before the developer was bought out by a malware company.
| oxinabox wrote:
| > in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances
| of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers,
| crippled or broke the product. ... the PM could go talk to them
| and bounce improvement ideas off them. Customers are pretty good
| at spotting UX goofs in the making.
|
| AWS really does like to "bounce ideas" off customers. To the
| extent that I am wondering if we should start billing them for
| consulting services. A hour long meeting every other month with
| 3-4 senior team members adds up.
| mhb wrote:
| There used to be an acceptable Scrabble app. No more.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| There is an iOS app called Word Master, it's a quite decent
| replacement.
| flenserboy wrote:
| It's amazingly horrible now, and there's no good alternative
| out there that I've found, now that Yahoo! has banished
| Literati to the nether realms.
| [deleted]
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I think the explanation for this comes down to same dynamic
| involved in Microsoft eating the office application world in the
| 90s; People who buy the application for X feature will still buy
| it or stay with it with X feature now crappier while people want
| Y feature, even if it's crappy will now also the app - especially
| if the app is a market leader.
|
| In software development, there's an internal to the company
| dynamic where the designer/lead-architect/etc wants to show value
| to the company and so rework the architecture into the current
| thing or some idiocy of their own devising and this is how
| features worsen. You can call this a extra process but I think of
| this as just the way economic dynamic happens. If this dynamic
| didn't still make the company, it would be stopped.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > ...in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero
| instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of
| customers, crippled or broke the product.
|
| The AWS recipe is easy though: add another service instead of
| touching the old one too much. Great now there are 200 services
| and approaching them is like learning C++. If one considers "the
| product" to be the entire offering of cloud services - I'd argue
| that the PMs fell in exactly the same feature trap.
| [deleted]
| gambiting wrote:
| >>As for iPhoto, I never used it much, but my eighty-something
| mother did, and took lots of great photos with the Sony RX100 I
| gave her when I gave up on pocket cams. She's not geeky but has a
| Bachelor's in the sciences and is really smart. At some point
| they broke iPhoto so she couldn't figure out how to do anything,
| and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried
| to get her fixed up, but she doesn't take pictures much any more.
| I miss them.
|
| Literally the exact same thing happened with my mother and
| Google's own Picassa. It was fantastic application to easily
| manage your photos collection, until one day google just
| went...nah? The app itself still works, but a lot of the
| functionality is just broken, and without the google photos
| integration working anymore my mum lost the easy to use way of
| sharing the photos she takes. And the actual google photos
| interface is horrendous, I'm willing to bet that it's constantly
| being redesigned so that someone at google can justify a
| raise/promotion, not because there's any actual reason to keep
| redesigning the whole thing periodically, other than someone's
| career progression.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Just to add another viewpoint, I think Google photos is their
| best product, and my grandparents both are able to use it
| without issue. They haven't even contacted me about it.
|
| I wish they still did unlimited storage, but the app is
| quality, with some pretty smart search built in (you can search
| things like "sunset" with great accuracy). The editor is pretty
| easy to use as well.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's happening to me now. My family has thousands of photos,
| and both the Apple and Google offerings make the process of
| dealing with them more complex than needed. Sharing photos is
| pretty unintuitive as well.
| akomtu wrote:
| That's the reason I disable auto updates for all apps on my
| phone. Only recently I had to update Uber because it refused to
| work otherwise and sure enough: the new version is a bloated
| slow pile of garbage.
| enquon wrote:
| When a product feature plateaus, the team starts inventing work
| from top down instead of bottom up; so as to keep themselves
| busy. The oblique objective is that, that the product becomes
| worse.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Software can be done.
|
| I used to get constantly brigaded by people on HN for claiming
| there's a point of completion.
|
| I believe people in general have come around to this idea more
| lately.
|
| It's possible to get to a point of "no further improvement,
| only maintenance"
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think this is an incredibly good example of missing the forest
| for the trees. The PMs aren't like this because they're glory
| seeking idiots. They're like this because as far as most of them
| are concerned, it's their job to constantly tweak the product to
| achieve business goals (which are almost always "growth").
|
| You can't just fix this by saying "ok let's promote PMs who are
| obstinate about not changing things" -- this will not align their
| behaviour with existing customers any better, bad things do still
| need to change. You'd need to adjust the business goals to be
| aligned with stability, and that's not something you can fix in a
| performance review. That's not even something you can fix at a
| company level.
|
| It's just consumption-driven capitalism in action.
| simonw wrote:
| I think another thing that affects this is staff churn.
|
| It's common for PMs and product designers to move company after
| about 3 years.
|
| Many of the apps I use have been around for more than a decade
| now.
|
| That means I've likely been using them for significantly longer
| than the people who are making design decisions about them!
|
| Changes that are "obviously bad" to me - based on my very
| specific patterns of using the app over a ten year period - may
| not be at all intuitively bad to the team working on it.
| Orou wrote:
| This is right on the money. Everyone wants to do new and
| interesting work on a product, which naturally means changing
| things even if it isn't really an improvement. No one is going
| to put "maintained system that wasn't broken" on their resume.
|
| One thing that has likely exacerbated this issue in recent
| years is "data-driven" product design. While I'm fanatical
| about evidence-based decision making, so many of these products
| are designed around a vague concept of "engagement" which is
| all about getting users to interact with the app as much as
| possible. While this is the natural end state for ad-driven
| companies, I find it very frustrating that a subscription-based
| service like Spotify feels the need to take as much control
| away from the user as possible.
| oakfr wrote:
| Engagement metrics apply well beyond ad companies. Basically
| any product used by many users interacting with a UI is
| eligible.
| ioseph wrote:
| I personally believe many of these metrics are negative
| indicators of UX quality. Session length, pages viewed,
| number of clicks could very well mean that users aren't
| finding / getting what they want from your app.
| blowski wrote:
| This article sounds rather 'truthy'. On HN, you're always getting
| to get some upvotes for saying "technology used to be so much
| better, amirite?! Bloody product managers ruining everything!".
|
| But it's harder than that. Apps need to keep up to date with
| operating systems, technology changes, business changes.
|
| Take The Economist mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in
| cancellations, so the change was designed to stem that. They have
| data you don't.
|
| Similarly, iMovie. I agree, I preferred the old version. But my
| wife, who had never used it until last year, got on fine with the
| new one.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Apps need to keep up to date with operating systems,
| technology changes, business changes. Take The Economist
| mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in cancellations, so
| the change was designed to stem that. They have data you
| don't._
|
| All of the above are still examples of product managers runing
| everything.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| As an analytics guy, we deserve some blame, but also can and
| should be part of the solution. Anybody working on a public
| website in the last 12 months has had their senses sharpened
| about page speed issues thanks to Google's carrot of AMP-free
| news placement for fast sites and a badge of shame and lower
| rankings for slow sites. Lighthouse has been instructive. Apps
| across platforms from mobile, desktop, smart TV, auto, and more
| could benefit from the same treatment.
|
| - Analytics packages need to shrink. Most can be under 5kb, but
| rarely are.
|
| - excessive event tracking and demanding items like scroll
| listeners need to die
|
| - Ad tracking is completely nonchalant about speed, and
| oftentimes chains dozens of tags (or hundreds to thousands for
| header bidding)
|
| Analysts can save the day by tracking the right metrics:
|
| - time and clicks in navigation should be tracked and optimized
| for minimal use. Get users to content fast.
|
| - rage buttons. No lengthy surveys, just allow users to indicate
| they are angry at a feature. Count the times it gets clicked per
| location.
|
| - Optimize towards retention signals first. They matter far more
| than conversions. Look at the usage patterns of users that don't
| return and/or churn. The top-line funnel will sing if users are
| pleased with the UX. This matters as much for desktop tools as it
| does for SaaS.
|
| - Each deployment with UX implications deserves tagging and long-
| term measurements. Look for how long it takes users to adapt to
| changes, and not just when it's brand new. More clicks is
| probably worse, don't brag about that.
|
| - Sometimes a longer session means more contented usage, but
| often it means more frustration.
|
| - pay close attention to engagement with settings UX. That's
| where people go when the UX isn't right.
|
| - Give users some access to the dashboards you look at, if
| feasible. I'm a firm believer that people being measured should
| be able to observe some form of what is derived from that data.
| If PMs exist to improve user engagement, engage them in the
| process. Two-way mirrors, whether virtual or physical, are creepy
| AF.
| gpsx wrote:
| I remember hearing a talk by Bill Gates a long time ago where he
| said the biggest competitor for Word was previous versions of the
| program. That is no longer true with forced updates. Granted,
| there are many reasons why it is not practical these days for old
| versions to be a competitor, but that would be a good message to
| companies that some of their new "innovations" may not have been
| a good idea.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| I think this is one of the biggest issues with SaaS. I
| appreciate that a stable revenue source is necessary for
| ongoing development, but UX decisions are much harder to
| evaluate. If I purchase a desktop application and opt not to
| upgrade, that's useful data to have. If you jam a UX update
| down my throat and I don't cancel my subscription, that doesn't
| mean you made a fantastic UX decision. It generally means the
| cost of changing is too expensive or, more likely, you've
| locked my data up in a format not easily exportable.
|
| I think it'd be nice if our tooling made it easier to support
| multiple "versions" of a deployed application. As it stands,
| it's far too expensive and error-prone to let customers opt
| into UI upgrades. As a product consumer, I can't stand
| continuous deployment. It just means my workflow can break at
| any time.
| [deleted]
| thinkski wrote:
| I think it comes down to measuring the wrong things. Reminds me
| of the story where a flight was 30 minutes delayed. Instead of
| delaying all downstream flights affected by this by 30 minutes,
| the airline repurposed the plane for a flight that would qualify
| as on-time. So they had a few customers that were irate rather
| than a lot that were slightly annoyed. But it was because the
| metric the airline was evaluated on was percentage of on-time
| departures -- once a flight was late, it didn't matter how late.
| oakfr wrote:
| Correct. But I would argue that they probably measure the right
| thing. It's probably better for an airline to have .1% of
| super-angry customers than 3% of frustrated customers. At least
| that's the directions that they all have taken.
| bob1029 wrote:
| You know whats amusing to me - All of the complaints with regard
| to Electron, many of which could have been avoided if the
| application was just delivered as a simple website.
|
| Most people have chrome/edge/firefox/whatever warmed up on their
| machine. Opening a new tab to spotify.com takes under a second,
| assuming you are using any caching at all. Opening an electron
| app cold is almost certainly going to take longer and hurt your
| system resources more.
|
| I feel like Spotify is a case where native desktop app doesn't
| make as much sense as something like Discord, where you _do_ need
| a lot of native hooks for the 2-way nature of the product.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop.
|
| It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would
| see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and
| you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list
| of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have
| to click "See Discography" first.
|
| The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly
| playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this
| "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All"
| next to that to find it.
|
| I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad
| enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!
| antisthenes wrote:
| I mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the
| most critical to everyday user experience.
|
| The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And
| if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more
| modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately
| concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the
| end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security.
|
| Nor is it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be
| made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes
| alongside security patches.
| bjustin wrote:
| Sadly, the Apple Music app on macOS also has major issues. For
| example, I'll open it and try to search, and the results view
| says "Showing results for 'query'" followed by a bunch of
| unrelated songs and albums. Running the search again actually
| produces results.
|
| Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least
| search works the first time.
| pbronez wrote:
| I tried Apple Music when I realized the HomePod Mini can't
| play songs from Spotify. Try as I might, Apple Music just
| didn't cut it for me. The biggest annoyance was the playlists
| and discovery features. It was MUCH harder to find a
| playlist/radio station for a particular mood.
| wwweston wrote:
| So let's analyze this for a minute, first at a general level of
| incentives that every software-building org has, then at the
| specific level of Spotify's founding culture and present
| incentives.
|
| Generally: ideally we imagine UX & product roles as creating a
| strong experience rewarding the user on for their engagement,
| by user standards. In practice, in order advance their career,
| need a narrative of wins they can sell to higher management.
| That usually means change one can take credit for, if possible
| paired with a metric management is invested in. Sometimes this
| metric is even connected with a rewarding experience for users.
| Sometimes. The incentive for change is there, though,
| regardless, at least as long as there's money in the dev budget
| for it.
|
| _Spotify Specifically_ : was founded under the premise that
| consumers could be drawn into a product that acts like a record
| collection buffet in the cloud, but only pay broadcast prices!
| (ie, free or flat rate). This premise was correct, but also
| relied on the idea that Spotify was entitled to pay artists
| broadcast-royalties while effect occupying the space where
| recording royalties used to live, cannibalizing the market for
| recordings. And so you get execs telling artists that it's
| "entitled" to want rates as high as a penny a listen for their
| music and Spotify wasn't built to solve the problem of artists
| getting paid it was built to solve the problem of piracy
| (artists not being able to get paid or set their prices is
| _indistinguishable from the problems of piracy_ ). [0] This
| tells us that either Spotify isn't getting enough revenue to
| pay a penny a stream, or it feels entitled to keep what it is
| collecting.
|
| And here's what else we know about Spotify: their revenue per
| user is essentially fixed. Their model doesn't have much in the
| way to collect more from a user based off the users own
| values/actions. They can increase ads, but that's probably not
| a user driven win. What else can they do?
|
| Well, they can do what the rest of the social media companies
| do with their feeds. Randomize appearance of content, mix in
| known engaging user rewards with other things that let Spotify
| sell user attention -- to a label or individual trying to
| promote music/audio in a given space, to third parties wanting
| to advertise or place another content.
|
| That degrades user experience? Sure. You think the company that
| is founded down to the core of its morally worthless founders
| care _even a little bit_ about that? Especially now that they
| 're such a huge name in music they outshine Apple in a lot of
| markets?
|
| Eventually, I suppose, other people will be dissatisfied in the
| same ways you are and maybe in a snowballing number of ways
| caused by the kind of bad-incentives driven rot. But it's
| likely to be a long slow ride down the curve, with an exodus as
| fast and complete as FB.
|
| [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-
| executiv...
| vlunkr wrote:
| Yeah that new artist page is atrocious. They used to give you
| the option to show all tracks at least.
| kilroywashere wrote:
| soulseek is far better than spotify.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I want to give the Spotify app one piece of credit for a
| feature that Apple and others don't seem capable of providing:
| gapless playback.
|
| Entire albums simply do not work without gapless playback.
| jpeter wrote:
| They changed the location of the "New playlist" button for no
| reason. The old location was perfect.
| sushisource wrote:
| I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck
| up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like
| some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on
| a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some
| features have _always_ been hopelessly broken (queuing).
|
| From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as
| perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix
| it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they
| should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and
| just never touched it again, but that would mean people
| admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure
| an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.
| grishka wrote:
| My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need
| a development team at a company whose product has already
| been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with
| it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for
| example.
| dcminter wrote:
| Regulatory change, 3rd party API changes, new financial
| products (often arising out of the regulatory changes) all
| require ongoing development.
|
| Plus I don't know about you, but _my_ bank 's website and
| app are a hot mess. In theory I suppose they could be
| feature complete, but in reality, nope.
|
| So, just visiting Earth, or are you here to stay? :)
|
| I've worked for banks and while there's certainly plenty of
| unwarranted churn the notion that they're done and the dev
| team can go home is ... hilarious.
|
| Edit: addressing your comment in an adjacent thread, a box
| to keep your money in (or, canonically, a sock under the
| mattress) does not need to offer/support:
|
| - Debit cards
|
| - Credit bureaus. Yes, even if it's just a deposit account
| and no, this isn't optional.
|
| - Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations
|
| - Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks
|
| That's before you get into other account types, offering
| credit, currency conversions and the zillion other things
| that sock doesn't have to do.
| topkai22 wrote:
| "A bank doesn't need a full time development team for
| example"
|
| Banks and finance are like the number one employer of
| software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might
| be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital
| banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs.
| Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely),
| they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop
| systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support
| integrations with changing business partners, changes to
| regulatory requirements, etc. I'm sure some devs pulled
| late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.
| grishka wrote:
| > Banks and finance are like the number one employer of
| software developers outside of pure tech companies.
|
| Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update
| various financial numbers in databases and is generally
| useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view
| a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal
| with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as
| it is right now.
|
| A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest
| to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant.
| Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice
| assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we
| make the wrong turn?
|
| And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to
| happen in the first place?
| blibble wrote:
| > As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money
| so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it.
|
| I personally like features such as savings accounts
| (which require a treasury department), a brokerage,
| lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud,
| and so-on
|
| a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your
| cash to sit
| randomdata wrote:
| In my experience, bank software (customer facing) could use
| a development team.
| wott wrote:
| Mine seems to use a different one each year :-/
| maficious wrote:
| Exactly, but banks aren't a good example.
|
| Some people here mention _feature plateaus_ and
| completeness of the app. Obvious question is, what should
| the employer then do? The software is complete, from now on
| there 's only maintenance, which is relatively less work
| compared to building from scratch, so as a consequence I
| guess developers should be paid less then? Or like you
| said, fired?
|
| Obviously the manpower could be just moved to the next
| project, but what if we look at the worst case scenario?
| What comes next?
|
| Are there at all such mechanisms that could allow for, say,
| a team of engineers that maintains a bunch of projects in
| different companies. If such a team would take a
| maintenance of a few complete programs, the count of them
| would make up the difference in pay, e.g. a few mainted
| apps for a lower pay equal pay for building one app from
| scratch.
| grishka wrote:
| What does a construction worker do when they complete a
| building?
| rl3 wrote:
| > _I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to
| fuck up a UI over time._
|
| My favorite regression is probably how the Windows client
| finally had _type-to-search_ functionality for adding new
| songs to an existing playlist, and now it doesn 't again. The
| Linux client still has it though!
|
| This is to say nothing of their radio algorithm regression.
| davmar wrote:
| We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk)
| Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides
| which features they determine are successful, based upon how
| our usage moves their metrics:
| https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-
| ex...
|
| So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or
| something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone
| wrong.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Sometimes it's hard to spot long term degradation of
| quality via short term experiments. Each little thing shows
| uplift, but overall it gets crapperier.
| xmprt wrote:
| I can only assume one of their metrics is the classic "time
| on app" or "user engagement" which is a bullshit metric for
| a music player. If I'm spending more time on the app then
| that clearly means I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I generally agree with engagement being a BS metric, I'm
| not sure I agree in this case, unless we separate out
| time I'm actively interacting with the app and time I'm
| listening to music and only call the former BS. When I
| first switched to Spotify from Google Play, I listened to
| a lot more music because the recommendation algorithm
| pointed me at a ton of music I ended up looking a lot.
| Now its recommendations have gotten to samey and my
| engagement declined. I'd love for them to improve
| recommendations and drive my engagement up that way.
|
| Now, similar example is Netflix. I've at times reached a
| point where I think I had watched everything on the
| platform I'd enjoy. Their UI keeps showing old stuff as
| new tough, different pictures for the same show, etc.
| This led to wasted time and frustrating engagement.
| (Aside: the best Netflix UI ever was a script I wrote
| myself when they still had a public API that just listed
| all movies ordered by how much they predicted I'd like
| it. That paired with IMDB ratings and filtered by what
| I've already have seen would be the holy Grail but it
| would be obvious when it's time to unsubscribe for a
| while)
| adriancooney wrote:
| I'd imagine their metrics are aligned with user behaviour,
| not experience.
| city41 wrote:
| I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang
| buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was
| simply impossible for a myriad of reasons.
|
| I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked
| pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab,
| white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was _rock solid_. I
| couldn 't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the
| tab open for weeks and it'd play music on command without
| missing a beat. They have since redone the site to make it
| look more trendy and more Spotify-ish. This new skin brought
| bugs with it and it's not the reliable workhorse it used to
| be. It's still way better than Spotify though.
|
| I am very sensitive to buggy software. And in my opinion,
| most software available today is just riddled with bugs. I
| completely switched away from Apple because of this for
| example. To me, this is the real tragedy of modern software.
| The bad UX, the dark patterns, the slowness, etc... None of
| this stuff bothers me all that much when it comes down to it.
| But bugs, bugs get me every time.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to
| lose money it has little reason to care if customers
| cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose
| interest.
| city41 wrote:
| Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I think bugginess just
| doesn't affect bottom lines of most companies these days,
| hence the state we're in. Also, anecdotally, I find
| people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in
| silence a lot of the time.
| godelski wrote:
| I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to
| me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to
| change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to
| left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another
| location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so
| many other things. Things that basically your users have been
| trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing
| hintings that people have been relied on.
|
| So, the big question is: why? Good design is hard and often
| underappreciated. I don't want to convey that idea. But why
| do things like this happen so often? Changes that don't
| actually provide any more utility. Changes that remove
| utility. It is just so common that there has to be some
| reason for it. Often backend people say that it is just done
| to justify their existence but I don't buy this because there
| are plenty of good design features that can be constantly
| worked on and improved. Is there some psychological effect
| this has on users because it is once again novel? So often we
| don't see good design improvements but things that just come
| off as "change because change." Why? Help me understand.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Most of the time it's for inner achievements for the
| product manager or designers part.
|
| Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they
| have different views.
|
| It can also redesigned to match style updates, useful for
| fashion, travel or wedding sites.
|
| Sometimes the menu increases that a list of buttons can't
| accommodate anymore so it's changed to it's own page or
| drop-down.
|
| Sometimes they want people to be confused and ask the
| changes in more general forums, generating free
| publications.
| mikelward wrote:
| I think the clock moved to balance out icons on either side
| of the big center notch.
|
| Then next year they moved to a left-side holepunch notch,
| but didn't move it back. Or even offer the option. :(
| [deleted]
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Fashion.
|
| Also, in my industry, if you're software is not visibly
| changing, people assume its dead and no longer supported,
| not going anywhere.
|
| People want to feel like they are part of something that is
| going somewhere. Software is not a tool, its a journey into
| the future!
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > Music player UI is a solved problem.
|
| No it isn't. Not even close.
| upcode wrote:
| Thanks for such an insightful comment
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| It's infinitely more insightful than the claim that it's
| a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.
| wonnage wrote:
| Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a
| long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long
| press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently
| organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable.
|
| All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly
| shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...
| malwarebytess wrote:
| But it increases three and a half key metrics, including
| engagement!
| ardit33 wrote:
| The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer
| folks...
|
| As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to
| the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate
| about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are
| replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as
| safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and
| the most boring features survive.
|
| Ps. I was one of the involved on that feature. I didn't write
| it (It was done in Sweden), but I created one of the earlier
| demos, (and patents), and that eventually became touch to
| preview.
| abledon wrote:
| I'd love to see a linkedin scraper tool that 'visualizes'
| where the engineers go who originally worked on a product.
|
| like here, where are those spotify engineers now... and how
| do the products they work on now, compare
| epistasis wrote:
| This seems very plausible, as an outsider looking in.
| There's also the problem of when new people get hired and
| out in charge of new sections of the product, and they feel
| that they either need to make a change to justify their
| existence, or that they have found something that really
| works well for the way that they use the product without
| realizing the variety of ways that the user base uses the
| product.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope
| podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their
| agenda down my throat.
| brentis wrote:
| Spotify is atrocious. Feel bad for all you younger folks having
| to deal with repetitive auto tune crap injected into any
| station.
|
| Can't say much positive about Pandora or Tidal or..
|
| Miss old Slacker days and prior.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I think that's just the nostalgia talking. Spotify has pretty
| great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those
| features.
| rl3 wrote:
| > _Spotify has pretty great radio /recommendations if you
| even bother to use those features._
|
| The radio feature used to be a fantastic tool for
| exploration. Now it just feeds you your existing music
| preferences.
| mattmanser wrote:
| One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is
| that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing.
|
| I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got
| so far from the core product experience that they actually hide
| the controls of a music player.
|
| I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to
| click to see the 'skip' control.
| ascar wrote:
| When do you have that problem? I see big controls right below
| the song if I'm in player mode. If I'm searching for more
| songs while playing the song is on the bottom with a
| pause/play option and tapping the song returns to player mode
| with all controls. Is that different for you?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of
| an app nowadays.
|
| I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently
| had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to
| figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given
| artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This
| task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All
| because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency,
| they _really_ want to drip-feed them with "recommendations"
| from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse
| the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their
| albums instead."
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see
| individual songs anymore :(
| pbronez wrote:
| I can't figure it out on Premium either, but if it's
| actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it's a
| money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes
| people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or
| something.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's always been hot garbage.
|
| From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would
| possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps!
| What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on
| playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc.
| There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a
| month ago on stock android on a pixel.
|
| Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. If I
| could figure out how to port ten thousand songs in a 150
| playlists...
| ascar wrote:
| I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat
| relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but
| not the song title and I have to literally search through his
| discography. But even that is doable in one click (see
| discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up
| to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just
| tapping on it.
|
| For regular use the search button is right in the middle on
| the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to
| my library
|
| Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.
| pbronez wrote:
| I'm also frustrated by this change. Very annoying that you
| can't see all the songs by an artist.
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify
| paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial
| improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20
| years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs
| or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but
| I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.
| hiharryhere wrote:
| They've also removed the persistent search bar and replaced it
| with a menu item called 'Search'. I always fumble now because I
| wonder where the search box is, first I scroll up thinking it's
| out of view then I remember it's been moved behind a click.
| ZucchiniZe wrote:
| Yeah that change annoyed me too, until I figured out that you
| can use ctrl/cmd+L to go to the search page and autofocus the
| search box.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The Citibike app is a great example of an app that has gotten way
| worse for no good reason at all. They've cut a lot of features
| like being able to see available docks prior to undocking a bike
| (i.e. for route planning), and you used to be able to add friends
| on your ride without them needing to sign up separately, which is
| completely gone. The bike unlocking experience has also gotten
| significantly worse, and will sometimes refuse to unlock a bike
| when it insists that you "aren't at the station" even though you
| are. It also treats all stations as points when in reality some
| are a block long, so if you're at a dock trying to unlock a bike
| and you happen to be far from the point the app thinks the
| station is located at, it can fail. Oh, and GPS drift caused by
| tall buildings is killer.
|
| The whole app has gotten significantly worse since the Lyft
| takeover.
| vmception wrote:
| Kill the A/B test.
|
| Sure we can blame the Product Managers incentives, but lets look
| at what also guides their conclusions: "hey look at customer
| stared at this page for slightly longer and then accidentally
| clicked an ad!" not realizing the customer didn't want to do any
| of those things
| Laforet wrote:
| Back in the skeuomorphism era, Twitter offered an awesome and
| innovative iPad app (version 4.x) that had a UX design based on
| three overlapping layers with navigation tabs on the side. One
| could effortlessly switch between your own timeline, another
| user's timeline and a series of tweet threads. With the amount of
| visual elments on screen it was very information dense and easy
| to follow. I had just bought a retina Gen3 iPad and instantly
| fell in love with the experience.
|
| The next major version update was a huge disappointment as they
| decided to take away all the good and unique things out of the
| app and make it just another clone of their mobile web interface
| which just looked barren on the iPad screen. Fortunately I had a
| backup of the old version which I was able to restore but still
| had a sour taste in my mouth knowing this version might stop
| working any day from then.
|
| I did try other 3rd party clients but none was as good as the
| good old official one. The same design was copied by Weibo for
| their iPad app which held out a bit longer but eventually it went
| the same way Twitter had.
| exporectomy wrote:
| What's best for the 7 billion is bound to be different to
| what's best for a few power users. It makes sense for them to
| be different apps, perhaps provided by 3rd parties if Twitter
| won't do them all.
|
| I find these "7 billion" apps are often effortlessly smooth for
| basic tasks that I don't want to spend mental effort on. They
| seem to know what I want to do and make that just about the
| only option.
| kall wrote:
| I believe the iPad app was so damn good because it was an app
| called Tweetie that they bought. That was a real shame when it
| went away in favor of the lowest common denominator.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I blame the self-anointed "designers" who watch a few YouTube
| videos and declare themselves experts.
|
| Everyone is focused on the journey of the 80% user.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Then there are apps that are just bad, but shouldn't be. Take HBO
| Max (please, take it). Once you're actually playing media, it
| basically works fine, but the sheer number of bugs and brain-dead
| user flows is astonishing. It's so awful that user engagement
| numbers must be horrendous. How does a major strategic play like
| this go so bad for so long? The guy they brought in to build &
| run it (Tony Goncalves) must be great at board room maneuvers -
| if I was an ATT exec I'd be ready to swap him out.
| sixothree wrote:
| I'll file YouTube TV in that list. I have no idea what they are
| thinking. All I know is Google is crap at making software you
| can use.
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| I can't think of a better example of this than JIRA. I remember
| installing it on-prem about twenty years ago. Pretty simple, easy
| to get around, pretty quick. Now, it is a towering behemoth of
| feature and I dread using it.
|
| For example, when you load the kanban view, when you re-focus the
| window, the tasks jump and bounce around, even if there's no
| change. I think that when the window gets focused, the front-end
| requests the latest data and then repaints it. Why repaint if the
| data has not changed?
|
| Another example is links. We add a lot of links in our tickets,
| and I'm always frustrated at how difficult it is to interact with
| them. When an issue page loads, it kicks off these async things
| which fetch the link data, and eventually renders them into some
| kind of first-class link div. The problem is that if you click on
| the link before the async call finishes and updates the link
| element, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. If the link
| does work, and you control click it, it will sometimes not open
| in a new tab, but instead in the current window. Which means that
| when you go Back,you have to wait again for the link to render.
|
| I respect that a lot of people are big JIRA fans, but I can't
| help but wonder if my experience is unique, or if nobody at
| Atlassian really uses it in anger.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not particularly thrilled by "hybrid" apps, or cross-platform
| framework apps. Never have been (cross-platform frameworks have
| been around for decades, and hybrid apps have been around, almost
| as long as smartphones have).
|
| Great sales pitch: "Fire all your expensive, experienced native
| developers, and hire cheap JavaScript programmers right out of
| bootcamps, that write everything on the server, so the native app
| is really just a WebView!".
|
| "Write once, deploy everywhere." Where have I heard that before?
| Oh yeah...they said that about C. They they said it about Java.
| They said that about X11/Motif. They said that about Qt. They
| said that about React Native. Now, they are saying it about Web
| apps.
|
| Don't get me wrong. There are some applications that I think
| hybrid or PWAs are the way to go. If someone asks me, and the use
| case they describe fits my vision for that, I will recommend they
| explore hybrid/PWA/WebP/Whatever. I recently pulled several
| native apps off the App Store, because I thought another
| developer had a better solution, using Ionic.
|
| It's just that native will _always_ give a richer user experience
| than any kind of abstracted framework. If delivering the best UX
| is important, we still need to go native (which is generally
| delivered via built-in frameworks, anyway).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I just started reading a Kindle ebook on my phone and on a Kindle
| device. The process of switching from one to the other used to be
| that you open the one, read your location number in the book, and
| jump to that location in the other.
|
| At some point Amazon introduced "real page numbers" for their
| ebooks. Those are supplemental numbers intended to synch up with
| the page numbering of physical books. You could display your
| "page number" instead of your location number.
|
| Recently, the option to display your location number was removed
| in the Android application. So here's where things stand:
|
| - Going from Kindle to phone, you open the book on the phone and
| go through an unnecessarily long sequence of button presses until
| you finally reach the "go to" command. This is already a
| significant step backwards in usability compared to the UI of the
| Kindle Keyboard from 2010. But once you're there, you can enter
| in your location number and jump to it.
|
| - Going from phone to Kindle, you open the book on the Kindle and
| go through, yes, an unnecessarily long sequence of button
| presses. Once you finally reach the "go to" command, you are
| presented with the option to jump to a page number or a location
| number. But the page number option is grayed out, so you have to
| enter a location number. But the phone app won't display a
| location number -- it wants you to view your physical page number
| instead. As far as the phone is concerned, you shouldn't be
| allowed to view your location number even if you want to.
|
| - The Kindle is similarly opinionated. It displays the option to
| view page numbers instead of location numbers. But, much like in
| the "go to" command, that option is grayed out. This is
| technically a step up from the phone app, where the option to
| view location numbers doesn't even exist. But it's not much of a
| step up.
|
| - There is a workaround, for now, in that the phone app will
| display your location number in the "go to" command's popup
| dialogue. I assume someone is at work as we speak hunting this
| down so they can remove the information from the dialogue.
|
| - Amazon's customer service people aren't familiar with their own
| products. They struggle to understand the concept of "I want to
| display location numbers in the phone app". One of them
| unilaterally disconnected from chat.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Err, no, the process for switching from one to the other is
| that they sync last page read automatically. You shouldn't be
| doing anything.
|
| It works auto-magically for me all the time. I read a lot of
| books, and I often switch between my Kindle and my phone
| several times a book.
|
| Maybe you don't have your Kindle connect to your network or
| whatever, but the reason you're struggling is because you're
| following the less trodden path.
|
| It works for books I've uploaded to Kindle too, though I always
| use the upload service via email, precisely because then it's
| available on both devices.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Maybe you don't have your Kindle connect to your network
|
| Correct.
|
| > the reason your struggling is because you're following the
| less trodden path.
|
| No. Did you read what I wrote? I'm following a path that
| existed and is being intentionally removed.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I'm _glad_ they 're getting rid of the location numbering,
| it's super confusing. I haven't looked into it but it
| sounds like they're making a genuine improvement to page
| numbering, but with growing pains.
|
| You're going through a bit of pain while they transition
| because you use it in a weird way.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'm glad they're getting rid of the location numbering,
| it's super confusing.
|
| In that...?
|
| Locations start at 1 and increase from there. Page
| numbers are a disaster. In the book I discuss above, page
| numbers start at 1 alongside "page 1" of the book. There
| is plenty of material earlier than that, which doesn't
| have page numbers. It only has location numbers.
|
| The pages of a physical book are larger than a phone
| screen. So several pages worth of the ebook all have the
| same page number, which prevents you from jumping to
| later pages by using the page numbering.
|
| Jumping restrictions are even added in where they aren't
| needed -- in some books, jumping to location numbers
| doesn't work. Instead, you jump to a location that is
| determined by the app as being "near" the location you
| specified. This has the effect of preventing you from
| getting all of a particular passage on the screen at the
| same time, which I want for screenshots.
|
| So no, there's no improvement to numbering going on, just
| a steady removal of functionality that used to work.
| [deleted]
| herodotus wrote:
| I agree with Tim's conclusion but not about PMs. In my group at
| Apple, the PMs had no influence on feature selection. Their job
| was to get engineering estimates and monitor progress. The new
| features came from engineers and designers, and filtered up the
| chain to division directors who then usually approved or
| disapproved them. My feeling is that part the problem is a kind
| of organizational inertia: what do you do with all your engineers
| when your builds are now all done prior to release, and the only
| bugs that will be worked on are ones that would stop shipment of
| the pending release? The answer was to get us all to propose new
| features for the next release. So everyone gets caught in this
| propose/design/release cycle that just has no end.
| nmstoker wrote:
| This seems like it happens with physical products too more and
| more. I may be reading too much into it, but it often feels like
| this is done (with products and software) to soften you up with
| the aim of shifting things subtly in favour of the producer:
|
| - make it less something you settle with longer-term and more
| something that's basically roughly the same axe but differs on a
| pretty short timeframe
|
| - use the changes to probe what people care about to a greater /
| less extent
|
| - take away as much that the average person doesn't care about
| enough to get really annoyed about (which is fine if it's
| cheaper/better for the consumer but often it's more about hiding
| the change in the blizzard of activity so you don't get it
| cheaper or notice the cuts that save the producer without passing
| it on).
|
| In software the one that was eternally annoying everyone I worked
| with was WebEx - initially a product that was great in my firm
| but eventually became the reason no one could start meetings on
| time because you couldn't rely on it launching in a timely manner
| because there'd be some idiotic update. It carried on until we
| ditched it abruptly - great move PM :)
|
| Anyway, it's annoying but at least it's not as bad as the other
| modern trend: wilfully messing things up for you, so they can
| charge you to have the non-messed up version back (eg airline
| seats being broken up on purpose for no good reason! Unless you
| pay a fee for them not to be a total pain!)
| kristopolous wrote:
| When institutions ascend in power they put too much faith into
| their own hubris.
|
| Software is no different
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Hallelujah. I at least give praise to the PMs that make it easy
| for experienced users to keep their UI. I mean, if reddit ever
| gets rid of old.reddit.com, I'll have to find a new link
| aggregation forum.
|
| On the contrary, Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups",
| and I hate it. Had to search around for a bunch of esoteric
| chrome flags settings, but even after applying those i couldnt
| get back to individual tabs.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The Google Play Store App itself has gotten worse. It is no
| longer possible to view a summary of the Apps you are
| downloading, you have to remember each app and then open the page
| for that app to see how far the download has progressed. I don't
| understand how/why such basic features are removed..
| jonplackett wrote:
| I watched a ted talk ages ago and it stuck with me (Sorry I
| forget which, maybe this one
| https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi...,
| please correct me if I'm wrong)
|
| It said that researchers tried for ages, and at great expense, to
| find 'the perfect' pasta sauce and couldn't do it. No-one would
| ever all agree. It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions
| and different people would find each perfect according to their
| whims.
|
| This never seems to happen with software though. When Facebook
| does a massive redesign they (eventually) force it on everyone.
| Likewise the new iOS or any software update as mentioned in
| article. It's always in this quest to find one perfect version,
| rather than accepting that there is no perfect version for
| everyone and you have to give different users choices, or at
| least options!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| They can actually afford building several versions: one for
| revular joe user, and one highly customisable power users. They
| can even allow (gasp) plugins!
|
| I mean, Winamp had skins and plugins more than 20 years ago.
| Surely it isn't some hopelessly lost skill, like making the
| roman concrete or the greek fire?!
| orangegreen wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y
|
| This is the TED Talk you're talking about.
| masa331 wrote:
| Are PMs the only one to blame? What about developers "bored" with
| old and perfectly working stuff jumping to new shiny hype trains
| whenever possible?
| wott wrote:
| > What about developers [...] ?
|
| Considering that often people complain about the lack of
| Product Managers or similar roles in most of the FOSS projects,
| and that nevertheless the same kind of things happens there (it
| is just a bit slower thanks to the lack of resources), I guess
| PMs are not the only culprits indeed.
| maficious wrote:
| That's true. I feel the urge to use new shiny stuff pretty
| often, but have no choice but to use old robust solutions,
| because new ones are just mostly proofs of concepts. This is
| also extremely true about the whole web-dev thing (the good ol'
| _one JavaScript framework a day_ ).
|
| I guess it just comes down to working ethics. Doctors are a
| good example. Among them there are people who just _do a job_ ,
| who aren't passionate about the whole _saving lives_. And those
| are people that work directly with patients and heal people.
| Now imagine how bad a situation is when a person doesn 't work
| directly with people and _responsibility_ seems little. Among
| developers, there are people who are genuinely concerned about
| quality of the code they produce, but they are a minority.
| There are far more of those, who came in the field just because
| that 's the next big thing and where the money's at. They just
| spend their whole day ramming that badly written code in a
| badly written codebase because manager told them to get it done
| by the end of the day. They don't see the consequences of their
| actions.
|
| I read something like "a bunch of developers are controlling
| data of millions of people" some time ago. It feels relevant.
| Quite a lot of developers don't realize the scale of impact
| their software can have on people.
| maficious wrote:
| While I said all that, I don't know a single bit about what
| could be done against such a problem. I guess it's just our
| nature. It seems to shine in many other areas (politics f.e.)
| as well.
|
| It's just your general mundane ignorance and wrong values.
| tootie wrote:
| I'm sure Tim Bray would be thrilled to know that my org hasn't so
| much as fixed a bug or investigated a crash on our mobile apps in
| over 2 years because our product managers have said they're not
| driving any revenue.
| mastazi wrote:
| In my opinion it's not just a PM who wants to get promoted, in
| many cases it's also misaligned interests of consumers and app
| makers. In the Economist example, the consumer might just want to
| resume that article they couldn't finish and later be done with
| it, but the app makers might want to "maximize engagement" by
| showing you all those daily news every single time you open the
| app.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand
| pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire
| all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including
| realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product
| planning process.
|
| I remember back at the Snow Leopard release of what is now macOS,
| when it was announced that this was not going to be a feature
| release (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/archive/20090...), but rather a release of,
| basically, catching and squashing old bugs. I was so happy about
| that release.
|
| Imagine if the Apple of today could manage to do that, rather
| than taking away yet another battle-tested, decades-old desktop
| convention in favour of continuing to pretend that conventions
| developed for mobile interaction will always, or even often, be
| well suited for the desktop.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Engineers would tend to want to optimize a thing for efficiency
| at that thing's ostensible purpose. Which means there's good
| engineering (the result is efficient) and bad engineering, if
| everything is framed within that engineering mindset. But that's
| not the only mindset. An allegory: A traffic engineer wants to
| time the traffic lights for maximum traffic throughput. It's the
| "right answer." Just like a music search feature with a goal of
| _straightforwardly finding shit_ is the right answer. But lo and
| behold, the mayor and /or the local merchants don't want people
| to just drive easily past their businesses, they want you to have
| a good look, and plenty of time to consider whether to go in and
| shop there. So the mayor has the engineer time the lights to
| create a longer delay, makes him do bad engineering, to try and
| herd mindless, hapless consumer-meat into the store. The design
| is still optimized though, it's just a different parameter being
| optimized.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The way people takes photos changed (using phones instead of
| cameras changes the frequency and type of pictures) so iPhoto had
| to change to accommodate the new users and usage pattern, or go
| stale and cater an ever decreasing user base.
|
| You're damned if you do and you damned if you don't. If you find
| a great UX for your app and decide to keep it that way, 5 years
| later all potential new users will look and say "that's old, isnt
| there a modern app for this?"
|
| It's silly, just like fashion, but software has a user base way
| beyond tech enthusiasts and that user base is very sensitive to
| cues similar to the fashion industry.
| api wrote:
| This isn't wrong but it misses other factors like dark patterns.
| These show up when there is an incentive to maximize time on the
| app, spending, get people to opt into surveillance, or herd
| customers into a cloud option so they can be put into a
| subscription model later.
| z911empire wrote:
| Bingo. Companies (and definitely, PMs) are focusing on
| engagement, retention, multi-channel, and recurring revenue -
| all part of modern business models.
| eplanit wrote:
| One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from
| Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I
| just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll
| through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or
| oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search
| them except via Alexa, which tries to _sell_ me a different copy
| of the same movie, or to sell me other movies. I can scroll only
| in order of newest-oldest purchase order. The more titles I have,
| the worse the experience is.
|
| Fuck 'em and their dark patterns. I'm happier going old-school
| and buying blue-rays from the criterion collection.
| zorked wrote:
| Heh. I am so sick of all the movie apps and how hard it is to
| find which one has what, plus the fact that they all only have
| American superhero movies, that I started renting discs again.
|
| Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via
| snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large
| collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It
| works really well.
| eplanit wrote:
| I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and
| re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so
| long ago. It's great.
| b3morales wrote:
| FYI you can still get discs from Netflix if you want them;
| they just don't make it very easy to find. Go to dvd.com
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, they didn't discard it so much as bury it alive[1],
| though?
|
| 1: https://dvd.netflix.com/
| kencausey wrote:
| In my relatively recent experience they are letting it
| die just by not replacing content that they once had.
| That said, I am probably underestimating how difficult it
| is to find replacements.
| samb1729 wrote:
| My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I
| knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not
| figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search
| feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which
| matched.
|
| Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I
| searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV
| right now:
|
| - The Grand Tour
|
| - The Grand Tour presents: Lochdown
|
| - The Grand Tour (again? must be a different season?)
|
| - The Grand Tour (yes, again)
|
| - The Tomorrow War
|
| - The Office
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| And just for fun, let's list the next 9:
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - The Office (again)
|
| - Borat 2
|
| - South Park
|
| - South Park (again)
|
| - South Park (again)
|
| It's baffling to me that table-stakes features like this can be
| completely neglected for a product which is obviously a massive
| capital investment. I do think I understand now why it is that
| my friend with Prime Video watches The Office almost all of the
| time...
|
| Edit: Apparently searching for "stand-up comedy _live_ " or
| simply "comedy live" does show the type of content the search
| implies. I'd be keen to have someone explain what non-live
| stand-up comedy looks like to justify the difference in
| interpretation. Perhaps they could also tell me about how
| "stand-up" carries zero usable information...
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I can't watch The Office. Too much like the real office.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Amazon search has always been terrible. It's very
| frustrating.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The ranking is probably influenced by the cost to Amazon and
| likelihood that you get hooked.
| chha wrote:
| Not so sure. I accidentally forgot to unsubscribe from the
| Prime emails way back, so once a week I get an email
| recommending shows I've already seen. Such as TGT, South
| Park, the individual presenters from TGT and so on. Oh, and
| they're also kind enough to remind me about their
| app...which is the one I'm already using to see their
| shows...
|
| I'm leaning more towards laziness and lack of creativity.
| egypturnash wrote:
| God this is every media app, try organizing your e-books in a
| pleasing fashion someday. You just can't.
| amelius wrote:
| This is what you get when every App has to invent the File
| System all over again.
| handrous wrote:
| My kingdom for a widely-supported cross-platform standard
| for file metadata and tagging.
| ttepasse wrote:
| It's even worse when media apps are coupled with a store and
| the cloud. I'm using Apple's iBooks/Books.app as an ePub
| reader on Mac OS. Searching the library always lands you in
| the Store portion of the app. The app always forgets the
| sorting order of the library. And 90 % of the time my epubs
| are not on the device but uploaded into iCloud; even the
| placeholder entry is missing its thumbnails. The best way to
| use Books.app as an ePub reader is to store the books in the
| file system and delete them from Books.app after reading. But
| because Books.app is there and free there aren't quality
| alternative ePub reader for Mac OS anymore.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life.
| Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me
| collaborate with my husband on a few things.
|
| Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of
| Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty
| but gets in the way of the core function of "taking out your
| phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes". I could
| roll back to the not-shitty version on my Mac but every time I
| pull out my phone it takes multiple seconds to load, then
| multiple seconds to leave the "Home" screen to search through my
| notes, or for the editor to be ready to use to write a new note.
|
| I still haven't found a replacement and I really need to.
| (Requirements, before you suggest your favorite note app: needs
| Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients; must not be a goddamn web
| view crammed awkwardly into an app; needs to let me access local
| copies of my notes when the internet is down; needs to let me
| share some notes with my husband. "Actually having a nice UI for
| handling sync conflicts" would be nice too, EN always did the
| bare minimum of "now you have two copies with a note about sync
| conflicts on one of them".) Right now I am kind of thinking of
| spending a week trying to press Scrivener plus an external sync
| service (Dropbox, etc) into service, since their clients are all
| Very Native, and one of the things we actually use EN for is a
| writing project...
| chriskrycho wrote:
| You might try Obsidian. I think it checks all of those boxes
| except "web view": it's an Electron app, but like VS Code it
| shows that web tech doesn't _have_ to be slow (it just nearly
| always is). They _just_ shipped the native client and it's not
| _perfect_ but it's surprisingly good.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| I think OneNote ticks all your requirement boxes.
| deepspace wrote:
| Second OneNote. I switched to it back when they broke
| Evernote. It does not do everything as well as the old
| Evernote, but it is STABLE. Very few new features in the past
| 10 years, and that is a GOOD thing.
| ddon wrote:
| Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is
| open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| I would add that Joplin is great because it's plain text.
| People keep trying to shove OneNote at us at work and all I
| want is one text box per note, that doesn't move around when
| I try to edit it.
| simonw wrote:
| The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to
| deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search
| for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and
| display that note.
|
| Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that
| says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now,
| try again later"
|
| I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show
| me my notes!
|
| (I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more
| than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases
| that most of their testing fails to cover)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is
| better than organizing" line that so many companies,
| including Google, try to push down our throats.
|
| Searching is only better than organizing if searches are
| exhaustive, and _I can trust that they are exhaustive_. My
| experience with variety of products, including Evernote,
| Google Drive and GMail, tells me I _can 't_ trust that. I had
| plenty of instances when I searched for a thing I knew I have
| stored, and search returned nothing.
|
| It's because of this why organizing is still better than
| searching - if you're able to sort your stuff into some
| hierarchy ("groups", "folders") and then be able to _browse_
| that hierarchy, you can do a fully exhaustive check manually,
| by just going over everything.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I never had any issue with Scriviner syncing between my windows
| machine and my iPhone using Dropbox. Took like 5 minutes to
| finagle into working. The setup instructions were top result on
| Google when I did it a while back. You should be aware though
| that merge conflicts were handled exactly how you said you
| didn't want. You get a conflict folder with the date on it and
| a second copy of the document in it. It's up to you to decide
| if the conflict version or the main document version is the
| right one.
| pantulis wrote:
| On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner
| with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new
| features (even the crappy "enterprise" ones) had stopped
| coming.
|
| Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months
| and while it still not feature complete when compared with the
| old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete.
|
| I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote
| account just to see how things are going. I want them to
| succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be
| offset by new users.
| nicoburns wrote:
| What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid
| implementation it had without adding new features?
| azalemeth wrote:
| I don't want new features. I _do_ want cross platform, native
| apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I 've yet to find a
| good solution that "just works".
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I think the downsides associated with having a common
| codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to
| compromises for which a native UX would have been superior.
| Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind.
| Sure it's a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep
| parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with
| a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the
| fussy platform shims aren't needed.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Everything is being spreadsheeted to death. Shave a little here,
| a little there. Start talking about worker productivity instead
| of customer productivity. Make every decision based on "returns
| to the shareholder".
|
| Can't have good things when the only thing the people making them
| care about is money.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty
| well, let's leave it the way it is."
|
| What about the Nest PMs? That app hasn't changed _at all_ in at
| least 3 years. Ok maybe it doesn 't count if they've abandoned
| it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Firefighters are heroes for fighting fires. The fire marshall who
| prevents fires is treated as a waste of money or a pest.
|
| Basically same thing here. Companies don't promote those who
| preserve good things. They want new things.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| This is also sort of baked into human nature. We adapt to
| things, the flip side of which is taking them for granted. That
| makes it easier to justify "improvements." Human beings are not
| good at leaving things alone.
| akudha wrote:
| This kind of thinking is every where. There is a reason
| politicians announce grand projects and cut ribbons in full
| public few (never mind these projects exceed budget and
| timeline multiple times) instead of fixing existing failing
| infrastructure.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Maybe that's not a bad idea. If we'd all be fire marshalls, our
| species would never have started cooking food.
| dzonga wrote:
| the incentives in the industry are wrong: - ideally, the best
| thing to do is do nothing, but that doesn't get recognition.
| hence people are always itching to tamper around.
| maficious wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I wonder though, whether b2b software also suffers from this,
| because such software isn't really made for public recognition
| and etc. in the first place.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called
| "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers
| and management and engineers to define what products should do.
| No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty
| well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold.
| That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted
|
| This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile
| developers and front-end developers increasingly don't want to
| work on technologies that are perceived as outdated, or even to
| work on someone else's code. Everyone wants to list new
| technologies and greenfield projects on their resumes.
|
| This was one of the biggest hiring challenges at my most recent
| large project: iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in
| Swift. Android developers wanted to rewrite everything in Kotlin.
| Our web app was already written in React, but the web developers
| constantly wanted to refactor it to use the latest state
| management trend. When Hooks were introduced in React, we spent
| far too long arguing with developers who wanted to refactor all
| of the working code to use hooks instead.
|
| The bigger problem is that nobody wanted to work on someone
| else's codebase. Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects
| and technologies that would look good on their resume going into
| the next job. Some of the most talented developers we hired were
| obviously only interested in using our company as a stepping
| stone to FAANG jobs (which didn't actually pay much more, but
| they were more prestigious on a resume so they wanted to switch).
|
| Blaming product managers is an easy out and will likely match
| popular opinion among people who aren't product managers, but the
| problem extends to development teams as well.
| chunkyks wrote:
| To counter your point, it's not just that product managers are
| easy to blame; it's that it's _literally their job_ to change
| stuff.
|
| Developers want to change stuff and do greenfield because it's
| fun, but that's a whole different beast to a career track whose
| job it is to change things. This goes beyond just poor
| incentives ["Googler gets a raise because shiny new thing"],
| into "upper management have created a construct whose purpose
| it is to disappoint existing customers who like what's already
| there".
|
| There may be an argument that you'll draw in more people with
| shiny stuff, than you'll lose when you break old stuff. I only
| have anecdotes and personal experience that that's untrue
| [digg? reddit? metro?], and no examples of cases showing that
| argument to be right.
|
| Also, personally I get my jollies working on other people's old
| code. I work with several FORTRAN codebases that pre-date my
| birth, and I enjoy it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > To counter your point, it's not just that product managers
| are easy to blame; it's that it's literally their job to
| change stuff.
|
| Sure, but companies aren't being blindsided by project
| managers who sneak into their org charts and start driving
| change unbeknownst to company leadership. They're hired to do
| these things and their performance is based on how well they
| do them, just like anyone else.
|
| This might be a good example of the struggle of middle
| management: You get blamed from all sides for just trying to
| do the job you're assigned.
| pshc wrote:
| > iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift
|
| Swift is hardly new anymore... are you going to maintain an
| ObjC codebase in perpetuity?
| zz865 wrote:
| Absolutely true. Though when I was looking for a job 5 years
| ago I had "stale" classic skills and no one wanted to hire me
| because employers were looking for new skills, cloud etc. Now I
| make sure my work is new tech rather what is best.
| oakfr wrote:
| Fait point. I would also add: blame the AB test culture that
| has creeped in everywhere. I am pretty confident that the
| current layout of the Spotify UI is not the result of a design
| team but the outcome of hundreds of back-to-back AB tests (some
| of them coming out positive, to the benefit of the career of
| the ideator)
| ec109685 wrote:
| Good point. There's huge praise when an A/B test shows
| positive results. "Ship it, we've made the world better!"
|
| So that feedback loop is going to incentivize short term
| thinking and small changes that might not be beneficial to
| the whole.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Resume driven development strikes again! Everyone just wants to
| use the latest shiny thing then switch jobs and leave the pile
| of burning mess to the next sucker.
|
| Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by
| solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they
| actually care about their product instead of the underlying
| tech.
| b3morales wrote:
| This is a fair criticism, but except for the inevitable
| bugs/regressions introduced by the rewrite, the devs aren't
| directly affecting the UX (making it worse). More importantly,
| they're not _deliberately_ sabotaging functionality -- the
| article 's _Economist_ app example -- in their quest for the
| current hotness.
|
| This is why "it's the PMs" is a refrain -- because the changes
| they make are very tangible in the end product.
| conradfr wrote:
| The average two years turnover also means that devs don't
| maintain their own code, which is a crucial way to improve as a
| developer.
|
| No wonder they don't want to work on someone else's code, they
| don't even want to work on their own old code :)
| bradlys wrote:
| Blaming the engineers for wanting to follow trends is really
| passing the buck. Blame the industry (hiring managers, ctos,
| investors, etc) for not hiring people who don't have the exact
| skill set that they're looking for. To be competitive (aka get
| paid well) in today's marketplace you need to have a skill set
| that is with whatever trends are most common.
|
| I'm fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn't care that
| I haven't worked on Kotlin or React. But I was passed up by
| many companies because I didn't have react experience - can't
| help it if my last few jobs were all angular.
|
| Many engineers are focusing on doing what will help them get
| the most compensation. And following industry trends is part of
| that.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Or just the fact that you need to constantly be on the market
| to get market compensation.
| grishka wrote:
| I'm an Android developer who despises Kotlin and all the other
| trendy stuff. I often get laughed at for my views. However, my
| apps are ridiculously slim and fast, so there's that. Oh and I
| don't have a job.
|
| It really feels to me as if developers these days care much
| more about the development process itself, and how their code
| looks, than about the end product of their work that the users
| see. Same for designers -- they want their UIs look "clean" and
| enjoyed like works of art, disregarding obvious, glaring UX
| issues that arise when any person at all tries to use the
| thing.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Runtime efficiency is just one consideration to be balanced
| against others. Maybe you would have an easier time getting a
| job if you would accept the new stuff and be willing to
| compromise on runtime efficiency so your team could crank out
| more features and more quickly meet its business goals. Note:
| the issue isn't your individual productivity; being willing
| to go along with the pack has its own advantages.
| grishka wrote:
| > meet its business goals
|
| I don't want to work at a place that has "business goals".
| I don't want to work on a proprietary product either. I
| just want to use my skills to make the world a better
| place, and moving money around ain't that. I don't want to
| participate in the rat race or help it in any shape or
| form.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The only way to combat this mentality is that developers and
| product managers need to feel more ownership of the long term
| success of their projects. When your compensation is roughly
| similar no matter how successful your work is, you're going to
| optimize for yourself over that of the best interest of the
| company.
|
| What is it in it for the developers to work on Object-C and
| other older technologies?
| Shorel wrote:
| Not everyone.
|
| I am just writing some hardware test app using C++ and
| wxWidgets.
|
| But in general, yes, you are completely right. It's just
| virtual signalling between developers. You can't just write
| something, it has to be Instagram friendly. It needs to be
| popular and have hundreds of stars in GitHub.
| ikiris wrote:
| so what you're saying is, you aren't paying enough for people
| to want to stay working for you on your projects, and its
| hurting you in many ways.
| over_bridge wrote:
| When is a product complete? One day it must be unless the
| builders are hopeless
|
| Surely there must be a point where the product functions as
| intended and the peak number of users like it like that.
| Instead we carry on. Everyone has to keep proving their 'value'
| right? Always changing, always growing. Everything eventually
| gets iterated to death. Any piece of software or design, no
| matter how much you might like it will eventually be replaced.
| It's as true of software as it is of car shapes or curtain
| patterns.
|
| Just imagine being the CEO of Evernote (mentioned elsewhere in
| the thread) announcing to the world that they are feature
| complete. It's a finished product and they are laying off
| everyone except customer support and marketing. They would be
| considered insane despite that decision delivering the best
| profits and customer experience.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Developers get 1-2 years at a job before they fall behind in
| compensation.
|
| So my resume always needs to be fresh. I can't be working with
| older technology because when it comes time to jump again, I
| won't have the skills to do so.
|
| Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them
| to sacrifice their future prospects.
|
| Devs have a lot of the same incentives product managers do.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| That may contribute, but we saw the same pattern in devs who
| had been there for 5-10 years.
|
| I also see the same pattern in "Ask HN" posts and many
| comments here from people venting about how they've started
| so many side projects but can never finish them. Starting new
| projects is fun. Shipping things can be hard and requires
| some tolerance for boredom.
|
| A lot of people get into the field because they like to
| program and play with new programming things. Regardless of
| jobs or compensation, there's a strong pull toward doing new
| and different things. There's also a strong aversion to
| working on someone else's project.
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as
| possible are opensource.
|
| "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes
| and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers.
|
| The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind
| boggling.
|
| Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to
| being pushed to the next thing every 2 months.
|
| My older relatives have no concept of what a swipe is and why it
| should do anything.
|
| Total chaos and brokenness for them and millions of others.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Swiping gestures/actions are actually a very natural affordance
| in mobile "touch" interfaces. They're based on the Accot-Zhai
| steering law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accot-
| Zhai_steering_law a natural extension of Fitt's law that was
| developed as early as the 1990s.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I keep trying to adopt this workflow and it ends in disaster.
| For example: Yesterday I installed a clean copy of the latest
| release of Ubuntu. Lets ignore the numerous annoyances that are
| unpolished such as the mouse tracking or the OS filled with
| apps that are worse than its Windows/Mac counterparts. No one
| seems to want to produce a cohesive OS + apps anyway.
|
| The one thing that is absolutely unforgivable is an app that
| you expect to trust instead ends up failing you.
|
| My example: After installing I needed to compress a folder of
| important code and pictures. Just use Archiver right? Well I
| compressed the folder into a zip file. Something seemed
| strange. Ubuntu's file manager was reporting 0 bytes for the
| file after compressing. Strange, so I copied it to another
| folder. OK 8.5MB. Maybe the file manager was just not able to
| automatically refresh. The file size seemed small given the
| input was 300MB. Me being a little worried after seeing this
| and having been burned in the past, I opened the file and
| attempted to decompress. First, I was able to see the files so
| I could have stopped there thinking the file is fine but I
| continued and clicked extract. It failed. Turns out the file
| was corrupted.
|
| Imagine if I had not done this sanity check and 6 months later
| I go to uncompress and the archive is corrupted. That is a
| potential anxiety attack.
|
| This is not a joke, if you cannot ever trust the damn system to
| do basic things, you will constantly feel like you are walking
| on thin ice. Its 2021 how is this still an issue? When you go
| to complain you are treated with an uncaring groups or more
| likely an actively hostile group of people.
|
| I have been going back and forth from Linux(various distros)
| for 15 years now. Not once have I ever felt that I could fully
| trust my system. The people who develop this stuff don't seem
| to care about basic quality. If it works for them, ship it. I
| don't know how to solve this problem without a financial
| incentive. There are no consequences to shipping regressions
| and thus even though the software is free as in freedom the
| incentives are not really aligned with many users.
|
| Maybe I need to sit down and read through as much of the code
| of the OS and associated apps as possible and set specific
| version that I "FREEZE" on that are good known versions. But
| then I will not be able to get any help when something does
| break since im on old versions and typically googling issues
| returns fixes for the latest version...so now I would be left
| with fixing the code myself.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Here is where OSS could _really_ shine - make clones of old
| programs and give them modern _features_ while keeping the old-
| school, actually-working _interfaces_. Rather than cloning the
| current (or near-current) iteration of Office, make a file-
| compatible version that 's a snap to use and avoids as much
| interface fluff as possible. Applications are for work, and
| should facilitate work.
|
| Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and no, AbiWord is nowhere near
| that), a WP 5.1 clone, a XyWrite that knows OpenType, a dBase-
| style interface (definitely not a clone) for a modern, free
| database system. Those older programs simply _worked_ , had
| command systems that could be explored and learned (shoot,
| before the Ribbon even Office could be sussed out through
| experimentation), and were about work. As much as I appreciate
| what I can do, capability-wise, with modern systems, the people
| who design them don't seem to be the people who use them.
| dmitriid wrote:
| OSS doesn't have money for good design, because good design
| costs money and commitment. Both are the things OSS projects
| struggle with.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop. And it's
| becoming quite competitive in mobile and touch interfaces,
| too.
| na85 wrote:
| >OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop.
|
| I guess you haven't used GIMP
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'll admit I haven't used in a long time. It's definitely
| been improving for a long time, but my recollection of it
| has always been as being somewhat messy.
|
| Compare, say, to Affinity, Pixelmator, Procreate...
| dmitriid wrote:
| > OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop
|
| Where? OSS is consistently a mish-mash of unfinished
| ideas.
| EthanHarv wrote:
| Blender 2.8+ has done a pretty good job. I think in
| general OSS UX is pretty bad, but there are some stand-
| out exceptions.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Yes, Blender is one of the really good ones
| the_duke wrote:
| Which apps are you referring to?
|
| I couldn't name a single open source desktop apps which
| has good UX or design.
|
| It's natural, since these are built by developers, not
| designers, and they primarily care about functionality
| and don't have to entice users with good looks and UX.
|
| I do know some Android apps that are pretty good, eg
| RedReader for Reddit.
| 1_2__5 wrote:
| While not letting PMs off the hook - I think "PM culture" is a
| cancer on the tech industry, and companies have ceded far too
| much influence to them overall - I think the issue is something
| else. The way I've described it is: the goal of many apps,
| services and sites now is to get you to spend as much time as
| possible in/on them, not to make you happy while doing so.
| They've learned that FOMO increases engagement. That the more
| time a user spends fumbling around for what they want, the more
| time they hold your attention. That user re-education means more
| time, more attention, more eyeballs.
|
| We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense
| of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless,
| because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it,
| while the metrics faction has reams of "data" to back then up. A
| thousand times a day we're subjected to things we don't want to
| experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric
| somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use
| software is just one facet of it.
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