12 ms·

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making the

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse. When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones. There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.

jjice 5y ago
This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.
- Philadelphia 5y ago
  Twitter has been so bad with this lately. It feels like the app is different in some irritating and pointless way every time I open it.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Yet every time the UI is still horrific. It’s like they’re trying the Edison way and trying to find the 99 ways not to do it.
  - EricE 5y ago
    When I did use twitter the only way that was even remotely tolerable was with a third party client (tweetbot was my client of choice; twitteriffic is quite good too). The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    This is why I only browse twitter from my notifications panel. Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.
- nineplay 5y ago
  > My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase. So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it. I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
- yosito 5y ago
  > why there are redesigns over and over and over Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do. It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of albums created by a given artist, and then play album X. "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do is play <random popular song Y by that artist> and then a whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you." I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      My wife has been complaining about the random feature playing the same songs over and over again. It's been about ten years now. I stopped using the trash fire because of it.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      Spotify pays a discounted royalty rate when they can kick you over to random plays. Business over user experience, for sure, although they might say you wouldn't pay them a higher monthly subscription to compensate if they didn't do this. Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.
      - aetherson 5y ago
- alwillis 5y ago
  I used to enjoy using Spotify before they added podcasts; now it’s kinda a UX/UI mess.
- moosedev 5y ago
  > Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it". And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff. When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon. I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics [2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure
  - omosubi 5y ago
    Compensation driven development
- throaway46546 5y ago
  Maybe making it harder to find what you want makes you more likely to find what they want.
- Apofis 5y ago
  They're running A/B tests... You like variant A, the majority picked variant B. Otherwise, someone new was hired and needed a project.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Nobody liked A or B, just some weird engagement metric chose B.
nikanj 5y ago
Because someone needs to able to point at Thing and say they took iniative in implementing it, for career reasons
- notpachet 5y ago
  I worked with a developer at <household ecommerce company> whose main claim to fame was that she'd deleted more features than she'd added. We need more people like her.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    What? No. Not if people used those features and found them valuable.
    - notpachet 5y ago
      You're right. Dead or dying features that were bloating up the rest of the codebase, I should say.
      - chrisdhoover 5y ago
        I made a career of fixing broken things.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    eBay has deleted a lot of features that made my life better. There was no replacement -- things just suck more, now.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Delete code yes, features only if obnoxious.
noneeeed 5y ago
The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups. Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense. Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.
- endofreach 5y ago
  As much as i am with you on this, i must say it‘s pretty good for someone like me. I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“ But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people. Apple has lost what they had.
- gcanyon 5y ago
  For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.
  - have_faith 5y ago
    This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    > I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it. Yeah, same here.
hintymad 5y ago
This seems the problem of every big company. Eventually they become slow and their priority becomes puzzling to people outside of the companies. Complexity aside, my theory is that as a company grows, the headcount always grows faster than the quantity of work, and more people become obsessed with visibility and promotion, which leads to promotion-oriented and visibility-oriented project planning. Consequently, product quality deteriorates over time, first slowly and then suddenly.
- blep-arsh 5y ago
  As soon as the company starts collecting metrics and sets up A/B testing infrastructure people can just implement whatever they want, as long as they keep improving these metrics. Very often there's no one who can take a look at the resulting mess and decide enough is enough. It's all just self-congratulatory meetings with extremely optimistic charts and an occassional employee complaining about the product being utterly broken and unusable.
  - thedougd 5y ago
    I'm convinced A/B testing done wrong is what brought us step sisters stuck in washing machines.
koyote 5y ago
> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse. I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem. The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on. I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason). We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion. If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.
  - jyounker 5y ago
    Sadly there is much truth to this.
  - tarsinge 5y ago
    It's a good point, management and execs always take the blame for that kind of behavior but engineers are guilty too.
    - 5y ago
kemayo 5y ago
I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari, moving it to the bottom of the screen. This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc. ...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.
WalterBright 5y ago
I don't use my iphone for email because I get 200-300 emails per day, and there's no way to mass delete the inbox. I have to select-delete for every email.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  In the Mail app, tap Edit, then select the empty checkbox to the left of the top email, then drag from the second email down to the bottom of the view (it'll autoscroll.) Then you can move or trash the emails all at once.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I tried this many times, it scrolls the whole screen down but does not select the emails.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      Are you tapping and swiping down on the unchecked circles on the left? It scrolls the screen down if you swipe on the preview of the emails, but not the circles you see after you tap Edit int he upper right.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I tried that, too. It just scrolls the screen down, whether in the Edit mode or not.
- acdha 5y ago
  You can drag down with two fingers held apart to select the messages. I use that fairly often, especially with search results. It's still not as fast as having a select-all button but does give you a chance to notice that not all of the messages are the same.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
comeonseriously 5y ago
> Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.
tomc1985 5y ago
> who wants to work on the broken things? So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence
- datavirtue 5y ago
  I LOVE fixing bugs and improving existing software...hence, everyone thinks I'm a douche and I never get to do what I love.
pjmlp 5y ago
When a product is good enough the UI/UX folks don't have anything left to do, so UI's keep being rebooted due to job safety.

jjice 5y ago

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

Philadelphia 5y ago
Twitter has been so bad with this lately. It feels like the app is different in some irritating and pointless way every time I open it.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Yet every time the UI is still horrific. It’s like they’re trying the Edison way and trying to find the 99 ways not to do it.
- EricE 5y ago
  When I did use twitter the only way that was even remotely tolerable was with a third party client (tweetbot was my client of choice; twitteriffic is quite good too). The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.
- marderfarker2 5y ago
  This is why I only browse twitter from my notifications panel. Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.
nineplay 5y ago
> My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase. So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it. I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
yosito 5y ago
> why there are redesigns over and over and over Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do. It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of albums created by a given artist, and then play album X. "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do is play <random popular song Y by that artist> and then a whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you." I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    My wife has been complaining about the random feature playing the same songs over and over again. It's been about ten years now. I stopped using the trash fire because of it.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Spotify pays a discounted royalty rate when they can kick you over to random plays. Business over user experience, for sure, although they might say you wouldn't pay them a higher monthly subscription to compensate if they didn't do this. Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.
    - aetherson 5y ago
alwillis 5y ago
I used to enjoy using Spotify before they added podcasts; now it’s kinda a UX/UI mess.
moosedev 5y ago
> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it". And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff. When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon. I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics [2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure
- omosubi 5y ago
  Compensation driven development
throaway46546 5y ago
Maybe making it harder to find what you want makes you more likely to find what they want.
Apofis 5y ago
They're running A/B tests... You like variant A, the majority picked variant B. Otherwise, someone new was hired and needed a project.
- antifa 5y ago
  Nobody liked A or B, just some weird engagement metric chose B.

nikanj 5y ago

Because someone needs to able to point at Thing and say they took iniative in implementing it, for career reasons

notpachet 5y ago
I worked with a developer at <household ecommerce company> whose main claim to fame was that she'd deleted more features than she'd added. We need more people like her.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  What? No. Not if people used those features and found them valuable.
  - notpachet 5y ago
    You're right. Dead or dying features that were bloating up the rest of the codebase, I should say.
    - chrisdhoover 5y ago
      I made a career of fixing broken things.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  eBay has deleted a lot of features that made my life better. There was no replacement -- things just suck more, now.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Delete code yes, features only if obnoxious.

noneeeed 5y ago

The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups. Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense. Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.

endofreach 5y ago
As much as i am with you on this, i must say it‘s pretty good for someone like me. I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“ But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people. Apple has lost what they had.
gcanyon 5y ago
For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.
- have_faith 5y ago
  This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it. Yeah, same here.

hintymad 5y ago

This seems the problem of every big company. Eventually they become slow and their priority becomes puzzling to people outside of the companies. Complexity aside, my theory is that as a company grows, the headcount always grows faster than the quantity of work, and more people become obsessed with visibility and promotion, which leads to promotion-oriented and visibility-oriented project planning. Consequently, product quality deteriorates over time, first slowly and then suddenly.

blep-arsh 5y ago
As soon as the company starts collecting metrics and sets up A/B testing infrastructure people can just implement whatever they want, as long as they keep improving these metrics. Very often there's no one who can take a look at the resulting mess and decide enough is enough. It's all just self-congratulatory meetings with extremely optimistic charts and an occassional employee complaining about the product being utterly broken and unusable.
- thedougd 5y ago
  I'm convinced A/B testing done wrong is what brought us step sisters stuck in washing machines.

koyote 5y ago

> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse. I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem. The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on. I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason). We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion. If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.
- jyounker 5y ago
  Sadly there is much truth to this.
- tarsinge 5y ago
  It's a good point, management and execs always take the blame for that kind of behavior but engineers are guilty too.
  - 5y ago

kemayo 5y ago

I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari, moving it to the bottom of the screen. This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc. ...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.

WalterBright 5y ago

I don't use my iphone for email because I get 200-300 emails per day, and there's no way to mass delete the inbox. I have to select-delete for every email.

1123581321 5y ago
In the Mail app, tap Edit, then select the empty checkbox to the left of the top email, then drag from the second email down to the bottom of the view (it'll autoscroll.) Then you can move or trash the emails all at once.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I tried this many times, it scrolls the whole screen down but does not select the emails.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Are you tapping and swiping down on the unchecked circles on the left? It scrolls the screen down if you swipe on the preview of the emails, but not the circles you see after you tap Edit int he upper right.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I tried that, too. It just scrolls the screen down, whether in the Edit mode or not.
acdha 5y ago
You can drag down with two fingers held apart to select the messages. I use that fairly often, especially with search results. It's still not as fast as having a select-all button but does give you a chance to notice that not all of the messages are the same.
- WalterBright 5y ago

comeonseriously 5y ago

> Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.

tomc1985 5y ago

> who wants to work on the broken things? So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence

datavirtue 5y ago
I LOVE fixing bugs and improving existing software...hence, everyone thinks I'm a douche and I never get to do what I love.

pjmlp 5y ago

When a product is good enough the UI/UX folks don't have anything left to do, so UI's keep being rebooted due to job safety.