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'Apps Getting Worse' (tbray.org) 122

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: 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.

It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.
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'Apps Getting Worse'

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  • ...one more time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unless you just bought your first computer, there is nothing "unexpected" about this.

      Software has been going to shit for the last 10+ years.

  • It's everyone involved (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dbialac ( 320955 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @01:54PM (#61681111)
    Everyone involved help makes products worse because everyone involved is also trying to justify their jobs instead of getting laid off. We've seen this with chat clients. Look at chat clients. AOL IM, ICQ, Skype, Facebook. I'm leaving a lot off, but all started of good but then turn bad because... people were justifying their jobs.

    • Re:It's everyone involved (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jobslave ( 6255040 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:07PM (#61681179)
      Yep, it seems to be human nature that we just can't leave well enough alone. Why does something have to keep getting tinkered with when it's working perfectly fine? I mean really, development on nearly ALL desktop operating systems and applications (aside from security/bug fixes) could cease for the next 20 years and nothing of value will have been lost. Hell, I bet productivity would increase since people are not having to relearn a new UI every few months/years. The 80%+ incompetent user base might actually master a few of the applications they struggle with on a daily basis, even though they've been using them for decades at this point (Windows Explorer, Office, all browsers, etc)

      • Re:It's everyone involved (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:36PM (#61681331)

        Yep, it seems to be human nature that we just can't leave well enough alone. Why does something have to keep getting tinkered with when it's working perfectly fine?

        Human nature *IS* to leave things alone. Are you constantly changing/re-modeling your home? Probably not. Most people tend to find things that they like and are comfortable with, and leave everything the same for as long as possible.

        It's only when money and Pointy Haired Bosses come into the picture that constant churn becomes part of your daily life.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )
        Developers should maintain the current patch version [semver.org] for as long as possible. This means no new features on that branch, just bug fixes. Put your new features on a different branch. And put your breaking changes on yet another branch.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Most companies have way too many employees. Even though they are making enough money to pay everyone, it creates the problem of having hundreds/thousands of people sitting around with nothing to do.

      And so you have to invent things for people to do. Create new "features". Make changes to the UI. And you end up ruining a good product.

      For example, at home I still use Microsoft Office 2003. It is simple, it works well and it does exactly what I need. And, most importantly, nobody has invented any ne

      • There are a lot new formula functions in latest Excel. One can do sorting in formula now and also create custom functions and loopings / recursions without introducing macros (which may get blocked by security warning when the file is opened / created by others). I am also 100% sure Excel in the days of 2003 was not capable of multi-thread formula calculations (at that time PCs are all single core) so it can't utilize the full horsepower of current computers. The old .xls format also limited sheet size to

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by noodler ( 724788 )

          One can do sorting in formula now and also create custom functions and loopings / recursions without introducing macros (which may get blocked by security warning when the file is opened / created by others). I am also 100% sure Excel in the days of 2003 was not capable of multi-thread formula calculations

          And what percentage of people who use excel will actually use these features? And how many are forced to use the new version without needing the new functionality?

          • And what percentage of people who use excel will actually use these features? And how many are forced to use the new version without needing the new functionality?

            You triggered me to seriously check the new features or capacity introduced since MS Office 2003 in AC's computer. Some more stuff I found include:
            - .XLS cell formula is limited to nested at most 7 levels. Now we have 64.
            - .XLS formula operand is limited to max count 40. Now we can go up to 1024.
            - .XLS formula is limited to 1024 characters. Now we can go up to 8192.
            - .XLS data validation formula is limited to 255 characters.
            - Excel 2003 don't have =IFERROR(formulaA, exceptionA) yet. So one would write

        • OTOH, I wanted something that could open new files easily, had updates (but not the BS UI that Excel has), and ended up on Libre. Not sure who needs a million rows, but it's got that, too.

          Zero regrets.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        That's not a problem of too many people, it's a problem of wanting to continue selling after saturating the market combined with no real innovation to be had in a mature product.

        Add to that, new managers feel a need to mark their territory and do so in a manner similar to a dog.

        And so, to overcome customers acting in their own self interest by keeping their money in their packet and sticking with the thing that already meets their needs and wants, the new versions introduce incompatible changes and withdraw

    • It is also a lack of general imagination by the companies involved. When a product reaches its peak, it is time for the company to expand and find something new to get into. So the guy who designed a wonderful chat client, may be transferred out that team and onto a new product. While leaving the guys who are good a maintenance to keep the existing Chat Program working.

      If your company has a culture of moving people after they have finished a job, vs firing and replacing them, chances are they will be mor

      • I was thinking along similar lines. Why would a company lay off a bunch of programmers who successfully completed a project? Hand it off to the maintenance team and on to the next one. I thought maybe this warped thinking evolves from the startup mentality where the killer app essentially is the company and nobody can mentally move on. But the author lists several apps that are not core the company and are simply value adds. Maybe this problem is even worse off at companies that traditionally aren't softwar

    • It's far from limited to software.

      Generally, existing things do get worse over time. The natural lifespan of anything is that once in a while there is a hungry young competitor who does something original and great and gets traction. Then in the succeeding decades, they go through the phases of trying and usually failing to repeat their breakthrough, then becoming complacent, then grasping and incrementally selling off their good name, and then die quietly or else with a brief flourish.

      It's just the n

    • While true; we all like to keep our jobs.
      Not to mention that I really do think society is better served when software has a team that 'knows' the software. You avoid that legacy software that no body wants to touch that suddenly has an issue and you scramble to do something with it.

      One of the trends I've seen that I first noticed with some of my friends who work at Amazon is the combination of operation/developers. I think this allows developers to 'justify' their jobs by also being involved in operations.

    • Thank goodness slashdot never changes.

    • Mobile apps don't have documentation / user manuals -- even though mobile apps need them much more desperately than desktop apps, which have enough screen real estate to make things somewhat intuitive.

      Thus, all but the most basic features of mobile apps are undiscovered, and undiscoverable.

      Tooltips [wikipedia.org] often provide lots of assistance in explaining a GUI -- and they are extremely rare in mobile apps, because nobody knows that a long-press is required to bring up a tooltip.

      The helpfulness of Balloon Help [wikipedia.org] went f

    • my personal favourite is how every time apple goes on bold claims about how siri got better with new technology, she gets dumber and understands even fewer commands than before.

  • Of course. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @01:56PM (#61681121)
    There was a golden age of apps about 10 years ago. There was a flourishing market of high quality 3rd desktop apps. The excitement of the new concept of mobile apps led to a surge of great mobile apps. Those days are gone. Mobile apps have degraded significantly as developers have learned there's no money to be made there. Desktop apps have suffered due to users' expectations about price being driven by the low cost of mobile apps, which has led to a race to the bottom. Even bundled desktop apps from Apple have gone downhill as Apple removes features in the name of making the desktop apps similar to the mobile versions.

  • This person really gets it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @01:57PM (#61681135)
    "PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero." An app should do a task. Apps makers forget it is about the task not The App.
  • ... "iTunes Coverflow" [youtube.com]?

    Never understood why Apple retired it. No other music player app - before or since - came up with anything quite as elegant or simple as this. So of course Apple chose to discontinue it.

    As the old saying goes, "Whilst all progress is change, not all change is progress..."

  • editors (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nyet ( 19118 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:01PM (#61681159) Homepage

    "many popular consumer app"

    Not just apps. Editor[sic] getting worse as well.

    Yet another typo /. will never fix. You know, because they're editors, not editors.

  • Get analytics and do A/B testing. If usage declines, then you did something wrong.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      Yeah but you see, if you AB test a thing, and make a change based on that data, it's still bad and wrong if the change isn't what I want.



      But also tracking is bad

      and don't ask me directly


      you should just be able to read my mind.

  • Better explanation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:04PM (#61681167)

    Maybe Bray hasn't noticed, but 90% of everything is crap. [wikipedia.org]

    And yes that extends to apps. If anything it is understated.

    You have a hundred times more developers pushing out apps than you did when the iPhone 3 first appeared. So naturally that 90% will look a lot larger than it did before. And the 10% will have grown too but it will appear to have been diminished because that is simply how humans perceive scale when not looking at aggregated summaries.

  • Having a bigger effect than you think (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:04PM (#61681169)
    We are at risk of a Chromium only web because Firefox was vandalized by the UI team and product managers putting in bloat like pocket while removing useful features. We also have the abusive Windows 11 coming out because Linux on the desktop was not compettive enough (Gnome still hasn't fixed their file picker in 18 years). Also many companies are skipping the desktop altogther and make you use a phone app instead.

  • Super App (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:07PM (#61681177)

    What's considered bold and visionary now is turning a simple app into a super app [medium.com].

    Keep the user locked in to your app and monetize the shit out of them.

  • You are not the target audience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:14PM (#61681205)

    Lots of people complain about "change for change's sake" or (in this case) "not worth learning new UIs".

    The thing is, if an app is successful, then its existing user-base is probably insignificant compared to its future user-base. If you've learned how it works and a change makes it 50% worse for you, but 0.1% better for new users who have never seen it before, then (1) if the app destined for greatness then it should change, (2) if the app is stagnating then it shouldn't change.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      A lot of people think this, including open source developers. This is definitely a trap Gnome developers have fallen into. Focusing on attracting mythical new users while alienating the existing user base is very harmful to open source and free software in general. Compared to the existing user base, there are no new users to go after here; most users have no reason to move from Windows or Mac, and no amount of eye candy will change that.

      Speaking more generally, to me software is just a tool. If the dev

  • It's not just Apps.. and it's not new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Optimizer ( 14168 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:15PM (#61681217)

    > 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 has been the case with operating systems and many significant pieces of software for a long time now. From Windows and OSX to Office to less widespread software like quicken. UI and UX changes being pushed in virtually every release as the "great new thing" that will make your life better to the point where it has become like the fashion industry where everyone is looking for this year's "new style" and follows the seasonal trends (dark mode! light mode! flat icons! raised icons! whee!).

    Once most software reached a level of functionality that satisfied 99+% of its users, such as Office did 20 years, for any subsequent changes to seem significant they had to violate many of the rules of good UI and UX design - like how Office 2007's ribbon was a step back in terms of explorability/discoverability. As a programmer, I am well aware that the menus and UI built up over the previous 2 decades could have been retained, or kept as an alternate mode, but I'm also aware that most people would have stuck with what they already had invested hundreds if not thousands of hours invested in learning, and the resulting low adoption rate would have meant the person responsible didn't get her promotion and bonuses. Priorities you know, the good of the one outweighs the good of the masses. And how many times are disruptive UI/UX changes made to promote something someone paid for (Looking at you Mozilla/Firefox)?

    > It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is.

    While the PMs may dream, their customers curse the day they were born and wish nothing but ill-fortune upon them.

    Most of the software and devices we have are tools to us. And now that we live in a world where they are auto-updated whether or not we want them to be, it is now a regular occurrence to go to use our phones or PCs to do something we have done numerous times before and be startled to discover that something has changed and it's made doing the task we wish to do more confusing, difficult, or that it started doing something completely unintended. No one likes going into the garage to get a hammer, only to discover that they have to relearn how to hold and wield it, but that's pretty much the norm today for many pieces of software.

    I can remember one day when it started that I would pull my phone out of my pocket and there would be a half completed reply email sitting there. Apparently after a recent update my phone added a "shake to reply" option that it defaulted to on, and it interpreted the action of my putting it in my pants pocket as a 'shake' and launched a reply as it was disappearing into my jeans pocket. With no warning to it, I had to eventually puzzle out what had changed and was going on. A waste of my time and comfort.

    Phone OS updates happen all the time, and we are trained to install them without a second thought (patch latest security holes, etc), but they don't come with (nor do we usually want) a nice tutorial spelling out ALL of the changes we didn't ask for and had no choice in. Desktop OSs are no better. Too many times I boot up my PC to find new widgets added, and my custom UI and registry settings have been reset.

  • think that change is necessary (to make things cool\relevant or so software dev's can keep their jobs). To me it's all meaningless reshuffling and rarely do people make improvements. Most UI changes don't improve usability, but what they end up doing is breaking the app\page or make it harder to use (I've seen a few instances where users rebelled and quit using an app en masse, so much that the app dev's had to go back to the old UI. One thing that people will never figure out is when you change a UI, you m

  • Too much choice = big mess. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:16PM (#61681221) Journal

    I've come to the conclusion that the industry in general has not managed "choice" properly. There are too many options floating around such that an insufficient quantity of people are managing and perfecting frameworks, standards, and tools. Efforts are getting diluted, making it large-scale DRY problem. Effort goes towards re-re-re-inventing wheels instead of perfecting the wheels we already have. Planet Earth is wasting IT labor.

    Choice is indeed nice, but do we really want 100 "C-" quality frameworks instead of 20 "A-" quality frameworks?

    Our standards and tools are a fucking mess with learning curves longer than likely viable shelf-life. And too many are doing resume-oriented programming by jamming every buzzword into their stacks. The org's office equipment tracker app does NOT need "webscale" nor "microservices" nor "async/await" verbosity. Just stop!

    Tools of the past were limiting, but by being judicious in their features, they would do that limited set fairly well, simplifying maintenance and shortening the learning curve.

    For example, take Oracle Forms (OF). It's ugly and a bit clunky by today standards, but for internal and niche business applications, it was KISS and YAGNI in action. It took very little code to do commonly-needed CRUD activity, and you didn't have to install each app locally: OF was essentially a "GUI Browser". The server(s) did most the work. It had enough UI features to handle almost all typically needed office CRUD. Sometimes you had to put a little extra thought into using what's there instead of pine for how other apps do it, but it could actually cover them. Developers got shit done quickly and quietly. Now it takes roughly 4x the same labor to get an equivalent app.

    I don't recommend OF for consumer-facing applications nor million-user apps, but there could be some nice lessons in it for those also. We really need a state-ful GUI markup standard, for one. Some may say "OF can't do phone apps", but most businesses still do almost all their work with mice and desktops/laptops. There may be ways to get both that would take longer to describe, though. OF went to pot with Oracle's rewrite of it from C into Java, giving it all the problems of client-side Java, such as versioning mis-management and security bugs. They should have left it in C, or at least something more stable than Java clients. OF app coding itself didn't change much between C and Java, it was mostly just "the guts" of the client that changed.

    Oracle the company sucks, but OF was just magical from a productivity standpoint.

  • Having worked at many Silicon Valley startups, and companies that have matured more as well, the article's author speaks with great wisdom and experience. It's not sexy or appealing to any product managers to have a legacy product on life support. They keep wanting to push the metrics (e.g. user growth, engagement, net promoter score) in the short term so they get a promotion. When it blows up, they start responding to recruiters on LinkedIn and go elsewhere after generally 1-2.5 years at the company.

    • Re:Wise Analysis (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gander666 ( 723553 ) * on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:31PM (#61681305) Homepage
      Product manager here.

      I LOVE products that are late life cycle, and close to life support. They in general have gained traction in one or more segments, still delivers revenue, and requires very little of my time.

      I hate that management feels the need to force changes to "reinvigorate" a legacy product. Then we scratch our heads, and try to figure out how to make management happy without pissing off our customers.
      • Good insight. As an individual contributor PM, your viewpoint seems very pragmatic. However the VP of product is playing game of thrones with the executive team, and needs to boost metrics; thus making all the other members of the Product team have to make such unnecessary changes.
        • Alas, I wish I could say I haven't experienced that level of interference, but then I would be lying...

          Once, I had a product that was essentially 35 years old, and it still was a strong performer. That was a lot of fun, and satisfying to manage.

          I am glad to remain an IC after so many years

  • One potential issue here is also just too many suggestions that are being granted. Either from developers, other company people, or the users.

    I've found that when I write a program and put it into testing it makes logical sense - at least to me. Then 1 person will suggest a little tweak here, another there. Sure, easy to do. Here's your button or checkbox that does whatever you wanted.

    Eventually though enough of these "improvements" start to pile up that the one sleek program is a cluttered mess. In ge

  • Do support (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:22PM (#61681251) Homepage

    My solution is that every product manager for software products should be mandated to spend at least one day per week working on software phone support, to learn what users actually are having problems with.

  • Just the peter principle in action (Score:3)

    by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:24PM (#61681261) Homepage Journal

    The Peter Principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "maximum level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Often these people making decisions are incompetent and don't understand the issues involved. Many just go along with what the people above them want them to do. Many of the organizations are self-serving, irresponsible and lack any real sense of ethical conduct. It's time for corporate reform and time to get rid of limits to liability.

  • I don't like my buttons hidden in pictures or look like a child's toy

  • Windows 8 anyone?

  • Because fixing bugs & security is not "sexy" (Score:3)

    by Bearhouse ( 1034238 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:30PM (#61681301)

    This article hits the nail right on the head.
    Listen to your user feedback, fix the bugs, stay on top of security, look for opportunities to make genuine improvements and tighter integration with the OS or other popular apps.
    But yeah, that would require thought and planning...

  • Whenever I hear the word "UX" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:31PM (#61681309)

    I reach for my revolver.

    Nobody who uses a marketing term like "user experience" instead of "user interface" can be trusted. I'm not a theme park designer, I'm a programmer.

    • Kept scrolling until I found this. The ultimate root of the problem is the postmodernist need to destroy and ruin for it's own sake, "deconstruction" as they call it. It's why postmodernist games are miserable and un-fun to play, and why postmodernist games "journalists" revile actual good quality fun games. It's why postmodernist movies are complete garbage in every way, and postmodernist "critics" absolutely despise genuinely good and enjoyable movies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by noodler ( 724788 )

        It's why postmodernist games are miserable and un-fun to play, and why postmodernist games "journalists" revile actual good quality fun games.

        I don't think you understand what postmodern actually means.
        Practically all computer games are postmodern in nature.
        The earliest example i can think of is a tennis game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two) for a computer designed to calculate missile trajectories and other physics problems. That was in 1958.
        The very idea of a computer game is postmodern and games have had postmodernism (in the broader sense) threaded through them from the earliest games, fourth wall jokes included.
        What you're talk

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      A lot of people use 'UX' as a 'sexy' substitute for 'UI' and can safely be ignofred but they are different things, but some people do use them properly and they aren't the same thing, and UX is important.

      Bad UX might be down to bad UI, but often its not.

      An application that works beautifully on a small data set but is terrible to use as the data set gets larger. Perhaps it starts to stutter and become unresponsive for seconds at a time. Perhaps the slow downs are due to bad design, or perhaps they are simply

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      I reach for my revolver.

      Nobody who uses a marketing term like "user experience" instead of "user interface" can be trusted. I'm not a theme park designer, I'm a programmer.

      This... Well apart from the revolver. I tend to reach for my hat of mild infuriation.

      I'm not sure who originally brainfarted out the idea of UX, but it was Apple who popularised it as an excuse as to why their interfaces flew in the face of all HCI/HMI logic... hence we already had a term to describe interface friendliness, Human Computer/Machine Interaction.

      Apple needed a fake sciencey sounding thing to pretend what they did wrong wasn't wrong.

  • money from upgrades, new customers is the reason (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rapjr ( 732628 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:37PM (#61681339)
    If you do not change the app then you can not create buzz that attracts new customers and you can not charge existing customers to upgrade. Program manager's trying to get pay and recognition might be part of the reason but the money is the prime motivator. Microsoft and Intel made an art of this. Microsoft would make changes to Windows, new computing hardware would be required to handle the new bloat, and app vendors could sell upgrades to run on the "new" OS. Everyone wins except the consumer. Apple plays the same game on a longer time scale by changing processor architectures which eventually make all the old hardware and software obsolete. Car companies have always been more blatant about it, building in obsolescence by, for example, using rubber parts (rubber degrades in about 10 years) and fine tuning steel composition so it rusts on schedule.

    This is one huge thing that has to change to address the climate crisis, stop all the planned obsolescence and make things that last a long time and are repairable and backwards compatible. It is just so much useless churn in the name of profit. Universal Basic Income will likely be needed then because many many jobs will disappear when the churn disappears.

    • Apple plays the same game on a longer time scale by changing processor architectures

      In Apple's defense,

      - Ditching the 68k architecture was probably necessary. Doubtful that 68k would have remained a contender, if Apple had stuck with it
      - Changing to Intel was a good move, because PowerPC didn't make good on its rosy roadmap.
      - Changing to M1 / "Apple Silicon" looks like a good move -- enabling significant performance increases over Intel. Apple saves money, and some -- but, of course, not all -- of those savings will be passed along to the consumer.

      stop all the planned obsolescence and make things that last a long time and are repairable and backwards compatible.

      Now you're making sense. A television fr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SJ ( 13711 )

      >for example, using rubber parts (rubber degrades in about 10 years)

      You'll find those are mostly plastic. Real rubber that hasn't been mixed with crap lasts for multiple decades. We used to have an old rubber power extension cord that lay outside in the sun and rain every day. Damn thing only lasted 40 years before it finally started breaking down. Until then it was as good as the day it was made.

  • It is totally expectedly (Score:3)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:45PM (#61681381)

    It is not all unexpectedly. In order to compete with each other, each app is adding so many features that it would be impossible to document them and provide user control to each of these features. So the apps do the decisions without giving control to users. These frustrates experienced users while delighting beginners. Experienced users take lot more time to leave the product (as they have to learn and evaluate alternative product) while beginners jump into the product because of all these new features the app is offering. Effectively, they gain lot more customers than they lose by adding more and more features that users can't control.

  • Photos is a better application in many ways than iPhoto. I mean, I LIKED iPhoto, and some of the functionality that it had appears to be gone forever, yes. But Photos now does a bunch of other things like sync with iCloud and provide access to photo streams. The editing tools are better, too.

    Is it less usable? Maybe. Could it be made more usable? Definitely. Does that mean it's monotonically a downgrade from iPhoto? No, that's a foolish stance.

    I also hate it when apps change needlessly, but not all changes

  • It's just that no one's bothered to notice until the last few years when the shininess of mobile devices finally wore off. I noticed mobile apps were terrible from the very beginning. They've stayed relatively terrible the last decade (i.e. the entire smartphone era). And they will continue to be terrible until we can write code in whatever damn language we want to write code in! To add injury to insult, all the rules and restrictions on what apps people can make/deploy with draconian review policies th

  • The User is Absent From the Process (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garett_spencley ( 193892 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:53PM (#61681441) Journal

    I've worked for multiple consulting agencies as well as start-ups, and so I've been on a lot of various projects in active development. The one thing that is conspicuously missing from most project discussions is the user.

    Market research seems to consist of

    - Business offers a sales demo to prospective client

    - Client says they're interested but "Could it do this one [poorly defined] thing for us?"

    - Business rushes to development team "We need this 'feature' in right away! How long will that take?"

    - Dev team responds with "Can we get some requirements? Like, I dunno, maybe a user-journey. Some wire-frames would be nice too if it's not too much trouble. Something? Anything at all?"

    - Business says "Sure I'll get you empty ticket that mentions the [poorly defined] "what" but omits the "who" and the "why" by eod!"

    - The next day rolls around and the PM is asking during daily standup if it's "feasible" to squeeze that empty work item with no requirements into the current sprint and wants an estimate to go along with it

    - Team complains about scope creep and tells PM it can't possibly be feasible

    - The "compromise" is that stuff that was being worked on gets moved out and shitty new feature starts being worked on with no requirements in place so they wing it the best they can. Quality of everything suffers because devs are silo'd from the end-user and can't possibly understand what problems this ridiculous idea is actually meant to solve for the end users. Not to mention they're rushing.

    - QA gets half-baked rushed feature towards end of sprint. Has objections and wants to block the release

    - Business overrides QA's objections because this needs to ship right away since the sale is riding on it

    - Some of the devs resign because of low morale due to dysfunctional process, being told to lower their standards and realizing that they're working on a product that they themselves would never use. New entry-levels get brought in to replace them since the job market is hot and apparently HR can't find anyone competent. Tech debt explodes which leads to more resignations of the competent devs.

    Rinse and repeat until the product is completely unusable.

  • The problem tends to be more with companies that outsource all of this stuff to the lowest bidder. Many moons ago, HP did this with their printer drivers and almost immediately the interface for configuring options became the sort of thing you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude to slap together the last 10 minutes of their last day. They just seemed to throw options in as they implemented them with no real consideration to grouping them by relatedness. More and more companies just outsource th

  • "How to fix this? Well, 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. I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook."

    Whenever I do have the displeasure of "using" the AWS console, I want to eat a shoe while smashing my head against a brick wall.

    AWS doesn't have any fully functional products a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      How about delete a file from a file management API? Nope...that's only available via a web browser.

      Delete a file where? Console consumes the AWS API, it has no magic console-only functionality.

      The AWS APIs are intentionally feature incomplete and, when you encounter it for the first time, you'll want to scream because whatever everyone who uses any given AWS API will want to do will simply be unavailable.

      AWS APIs are typically what can be reasonably done at scale. There are no major "secret" APIs that AWS itself uses for the console or for its internal products.

  • Well isn't this as obvious as water being wet.
  • VI "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is."
    see, works.
  • Mold the customer to fit what the app wants, not the other way around

  • Most of it is feature creep. Slapping on useless, pointless and often even harmful "features" to a product, which invariably also means that this feature has to be accessible somehow. And this in turn invariably means that the interface gets more complex, because it now has to allow access to one more feature. Whether the user actually needs or at least wants it or not.

    And the user is mostly to blame for this.

    Because when he's at the shop and browsing through apps, he's checking the feature list. Of course

  • The App Stores are part to blame (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Agent0013 ( 828350 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @03:43PM (#61681629) Journal

    I put some of the blame on the App stores. I had a nice little logic puzzle game out on Android that people just loved playing. The graphics were simple but effective and not obnoxious and the game play was excellent. To this day I still have people asking how to get it on their new phones.

    But, it doesn't show up on the store anymore because it has not changed in a few years. It was perfect and worked flawlessly. I had plans to add puzzle sharing, so you could pass the same puzzle to a friend and compare times, but otherwise it was working and done. It still works perfectly on modern Android versions, but the Goog store either lowers it's ranking or even removes it from the store completely if there are no more updates. So update for update's sake just to stay on the store, I guess!

  • My dark suspicion (Score:5, Funny)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @04:05PM (#61681693) Journal

    There is a shadowy figure, the UX Antichrist, who moves from job to job making products as unusable as possible and teaching others to do the same.

  • Web sites suffer from the same failing too. Every new manager has to improve the company web site and put their mark on it. Whenever I visit a site that I haven't been to in a while, I have to search for what I used to be able to find easily. They've f*cking moved it somewhere un-intuitive. It's almost not worth bookmarking some sites. If it weren't for Google or The Duck, the web as we knew it would be mostly gone.

  • "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is."

    That will also get everyone laid off. "You guys don't have anything to do, so we don't need you anymore."

  • I have an iPhone and for work/personal I have the three following apps: mail (default), gmail, outlook. The UX is crazily different between all three of them, showing that Apple, Google, and Microsoft no longer adhere to the HID in any meaningful way. If these apps with radically different interfaces for swipe left, swipe right, and select all, happily co-exist in the app store, then what is the purpose of the HID anymore? I suspect, none. I honestly feel like I'm back in the days of CD-ROMs with their craz

  • and reintroduce the original version 1 design everyone loved, but now with more pastel colors.

  • The Vita Principle (Score:4, Informative)

    by Crass Spektakel ( 4597 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @10:17PM (#61682791) Homepage

    This actually no new news. In german folklore the Vita Prinzip is well know for several generations which basically says:

    Highly Qualified People are considered highly qualified because of many projects listed on their Vita.

    To list many projects on ones Vita one must do many projects even if they don't make sense.

    If a project doesn't make sense leave the project before it is finished. If it fails later it obviously failed because the best man - you - has left the project.

  • Triumph of the mediocre (Score:3)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @10:21PM (#61682799)

    Every dev who has ever worked in a big org knows that PMs are the junior manager class with an unreasonable belief in their own superiority and has no use for technical knowledge. The job of the dev is to obey the PM or face action from HR.

    I thought everybody knew this? Google is ground zero for this, that is why Google products never get their issues fixed.

  • Unlike Websites, Apps do not need Domains;

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