Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I opened Word, I got a message: "In order to continue to use Word, you must sign into a Microsoft Account". Really? The laws of the physical fucking universe make this impossible?
Needless to say, that crap is uninstalled. I already chose a cloud provider, I dont need yet another one, fragmenting my data storage.
What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later with computers that are only a little faster on single core performance?
Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the churn for smartphones and tablets was a multiple of desktop pcs. Cars are a mature industry. You still have to replace your car regularly, but the new car doesn't go faster.
But I have the feeling Microsoft is even loosing their market share on laptops, everyone around me replaced their windows laptop with a mac. And despite being myself heavily invested in the windows ecosystem, I am very uncomfortable with their new OS and considering alternatives.
In other words, planned obolescence. Often more euphemistically known as "lifecycle engineering/management". Solid-state electronics can function indefinitely if they're designed well and not abused, but the companies obviously don't like that so they're deliberately trying to shorten it, often saving some cost too. I have 20+ years old hardware that still works just fine, and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues functioning 20 years from now.
I just upgraded my "old" Dell Precision T5500 to a X99 hand-built machine with an NVMe SSD and so on and I was rather underwhelmed: It's not as fast as a 5 year jump in architecture would have been 10 years ago (if that makes sense!), not even close.
I think Moore's law is done already. Intel have slowed their speed improvements over the last several years and are getting rid of their tick-tock.
I think it's market maturity: Things are "fast enough" (yes there are always those that push the limits, like gamers) but I reckon there are more mums and dads that just want stuff to work and will hang onto it for years than those that demand the fastest every year.
In fact, something I see in forums now is that even gamers are hanging onto their "old" 2600k chips since they are still incredibly fast.
My feelings on the OS are that the OS is something I shouldn't have to deal with much... it's merely a vessel to launch my applications (Visual Studio and SQL Server mainly) so I don't need anything else as long as I can run my applications and it's secure enough (I am still on Win 8.1 with Start8).
I am willing to go out on a limb and say that many others will be the same and from personal experience, just in my own circle, they are:
Me: Upgraded my 2010 Precision to a new machine last month Wife: Upgraded her 6 year old MAC at Christmas Dad: Upgraded his 8 year old Win XP machine last year for a £300 Dell Brother: Still rocking a first gen Macbook Pro
Of course most Office applications don't need a GPU, and all the bloat in modern operating systems doesn't help create an impression of speed on the desktop.
More the opposite - if you're saving to the cloud, it's always going to feel much slower and clunkier than saving to a local disk.
But creative and scientific applications - including AI - always need all the cycles available and then some. There are apps that could sink a 1000X CPU speed bump without blinking. They'll become more practical as they move to GPUs, but there's a significant extra cost in coding for not-really-standard GPU families than for a generic mostly-standard CPU range.
I've switched over completely to Google Docs. Sure, Word has more features, but none that I really miss.
Then why did you install Word? If you didn't want to "jump through hoops" then why not just use Google Docs - which won't ask you anything since you're already using your Google account?
>Then why did you install Word?
"Its a hugely wonderful word processor"
> If you didn't want to "jump through hoops" then why not just use Google Docs
Seems like they did exactly that. "Needless to say, that crap is uninstalled. I already chose a cloud provider, I dont need yet another on"
Until I read parent's comment, I had no idea I needed a Microsoft account to save . I have Word installed, but only ever use it as a viewer.
The worst example of this is ChromeOS. You can't even create a fucking local account with Google's permission.
Have you tried the iPad with anyone there? It may ratchet down the complexity some, and the accessibility features are very good.
Some interesting points:
* http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...
* 'The headline of a Forbes article says it all: "Apple iOS 9 has 25 Great Secret Features." Secret features? If these are such great features, why are they secret?'
* 'Today’s devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double?'
I wish something like that was still bundled with Windows Seven/8.1/10, Ubuntu, Android, etc. That would save the regular folks I have to help some time and frustration when they want the device `to bloody work`.
Anecdote: I met a lot of 40~50 years old people who are persuaded children and teenagers know the ins and outs of those interfaces. I stopped bothering explaining them they don't but that stereotype doesn't seem to die and it keeps on hopping to the next generation.
Are you sure you are the intended user? Catering to a different userbase might be their intent.
Google chat was a product that reliably sent messages to people, told me if someone was online, and was fast, too.
These meetings weren't big - typically 3 to 5 people - but when it worked for everyone at once, without reconnecting, rebooting etc., we cheered. This was an unusual occurence.
I had Hangouts crash - especially on Android - I had it request a browser plugin to be installed over and over again, and I never managed to get it to work on Firefox (switching to a different browser for Hangouts only proved easier), I had no audio, or distorted audio, or people dropping out of calls...
I'm glad your user experience wasn't as abysmal as ours, or rcheu's, but in my opinion you're a lucky one
One good feature it has is that it recognizes keyboard tapping, and suggests you put yourself on mute when it's detected
The unfortunate thing is that these "normal users" today don't seem to have gotten much better at using computers compared to the generations before, despite having literally grown up with them. Dumbed-down software certainly isn't helping them become more advanced users.
Hell, nobody complains that Photoshop is complicated. It is expected of you to read some tutorials in order to use it effectively.
I'm not saying the interface should be obtuse for a reason. But the current trend of sacrificing features to simplify the UI is simply dumb. Market-driven, yes, but just dumb. We could do much more with technology we have if not for it.
Sure, but your stoves interface could in theory be made a lot better if your stove was more complex. Instead of having to chose an arbitrary value between OFF and LOTS you could dial in 85 degrees and have your stove guarantee that the liquid in the pot on that hotplate will never go above 85 degrees.
While in one dimension it would make the implementation details of your stoves internals a lot more complex it would make the act of using your stove a lot more simple and save people from making some very common mistakes (ie choosing a slightly too high arbitrary number)
I am amazed how average users are often unaware of basic features of their smartphones, e.g. calendars that sync across devices (holy grail in the Palm OS days) as well as contacts that sync. How many times did you see FB updates that said "I lost my phone, please send me your number again"?
As there are now so many non-geeks using smartphones, it would be good to have more information for them on how to make the most of their phones.
> Mayden had an answer pretty quickly: Tesla.
I don't think one can really say that the makers of the glass infotainment console understand design for humans. Affordances (knobs, dials, switches, levers &c.) enable one to alter settings without taking one's eyes off the road and without interrupting the flow of conversation (like voice commands do).
But still, it really not representative of the Apple ecosystem IMHO.
3D Touch on iOS for instance is a state of the art demonstration of how to transparently and smoothly add a layer of functionality to an existing interface.
On the iphone, the "for you" icon is a heart. The "like" icon is also a heart, but the relationship between the two is tenuous. The "plus" button adds a song to my music but I still have to hit "download" to keep that song on my device. I have to double-opt-in to music I want? Make it easy to add music! To really say you like something there's plus, download and like. And then there's still the 1-5 rating, which I just had to click around for 30 seconds to find again. No idea if Apple will feed me more of liked-plussed-downloaded-5-star music than simply liked.
I haven't found 3D touch that useful. I try it all the time but it just feels gimmicky. Half-push to get something, full-push to get the same thing I'd get if I just touched it lightly. Sometimes it's a menu, sometimes it opens up a preview, sometimes a combo preview and menu. I'd bet 70% of people just don't use it because it's too faffy.
And I just remembered Airdrop, where the "air" part seems to be more representative of Airdrop reliability than anything else. Does it want wifi? Proximity? The moon in a given phase? What incantations must I perform to move this photo two feet? Why can it see the ipad but not the other phone, when the other phone can see this phone? Can I add a favourite set of devices so it can find each other a bit more quickly?
Apple are fantastic at simple interactions, when there's one button and three things to do. They can distill better than anyone. But make things slightly tricky and they overload one button with 100 features and start falling over their feet.
You can turn off the iCloud Music Library and sync via cable
Why? What point are you trying to make? It's not obvious and not simple. I also had to google how to do this. Are you claiming that this was obvious and easy?
There is a lot of programs that are simple to use if one manages to discover the functionality. This is bad on mobiles where the desire to save on screen real estate often goes to far with no clues left that one can do something simply with a particular gesture. But even on desktop this has been bad starting with that MS Office interface when one has to search internet to discover how to do basic things. And MS has not learned the lesson and tried another undiscoverable interface with Windows 8. But at least discoverability is possible to fix if developers willing to listen to the users.
iTunes problem is different. It is a typical feature creep where new functionality makes it harder to use what was there before. This is difficult to fix as scalable interface that allows to do a lot of things in a simple way is a hard problem.
El Capitan has seriously made me consider if my next computer should be something other than a Mac. While I do like if to "normal" computing, such as browsing, word processing and browsing, I think it's getting increasingly worse as a development platform.
Yes, iTunes is a huge mess, and there aren't any good alternatives which support iPod syncing. El Capitan isn't the bug-fix version it should have been, it's an eye candy release the introduces subtle annoyances.
For me the underlying graphics changes and other tweaks in El Cap made my 5 year old MacBook Air snappy again, I use Xcode the entire day and things seem better than before.
There is some initial flux around new release time (broken Homebrew or something else for a week) but they tend to settle down quickly.
More specific example the "Open with" when you right click on something is extremely slow.
It's not really helpful, but over all El Capitan just feel not quite done to me.
> "We've moved into an age where the ubiquity and complexity of toolsets outpace the ability to leverage them tastefully,"
"Tastefully" - a much more tasteful term than the self aggrandizing "beautiful" I've been seeing used in design circles.
> “[iTunes] started out as a charming bungalow. Now it’s got turrets, a garage for a zamboni, and a helipad on the top.”
A Zamboni I have now discovered is one of those machines for resurfacing an ice-rink. Totes Hillaire!
> You've given people more of a skateboard or a unicycle. You can't bring the groceries home on that
Makes me think of that famous picture of the guy in china freighting a huge overarching load on his push-bike.
Brilliant article!
It doesn't really go into "why" as suggested by the headline (except maybe for to say that these businesses' product offering is now more complex than mere devices).
My personal suspicion is the rote application of established physical production that has worked so well on the hardware end (which we all know doesn't work for software) and the denigration of the software end to being "value added" (which IMHO was always "value gating"). This is perhaps somewhere that google/alphabet has the edge, albeit mitigated by being more "open" and "too much text".
So many features are added based on whims, decided on meeting rooms and based on engineers or managers gut feelings, that it actually seems normal for software to get complicated. If we tried to keep the new features somewhat restrained to things we actually are confident that users want (by doing user research!), maybe the piling of new features would slow down.
Btw. don't think the Tesla comparison is fair.
Writing a web-based email service or an online document editor may be a lot of work, but these are just basic office tools, and it doesn't sound like rocket science.
smartphones are good for stay connected but not for actual 'doing stuff'.