Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform.
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.
Even worse: I bought a Microsoft Arc mouse, a charming little thing except for one misfeature: After a few moments of using it, I got annoyed by the simulated click noise on the simulated scroll wheel. But, the only way to disable the noise is/was to download some “app” from the Windows store that would provide the interface to the mouse. This means that I had to create and use a Microsoft account just to fully “unlock” a mouse that already cost me $70 dollars. I returned the damned thing the next day.
Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software?
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?
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
Moore's law is still alive on GPUs, which are developing at ludicrous speed.
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.
> How can they make money if you permanently own your software?
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.
This is true. Their problem is that until recently they've existed in a growth market and their annual profits rely on new PC sales. Shareholders don't see "we're a $10 billion company but we'll be transitioning to a $2 billion company over the next 10 years" as an acceptable strategy so they're forced to try and wring growth-market profits out of a mature market.
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 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.
Many universities are adopting Office 365 which comes with a free licence for faculty, staff, and students: they can install it on up to 5 different devices and have 1TB of space on OneDrive. The catch: after students graduate, they lose their free OneDrive and must start paying if they want to use upgraded versions of Office 365. By that point, many will have become "addicted" to the software and will gladly pay to continue to use it.
Idk I was a huge supporter of ms productivity software up until when they tried to convert me from a customer to a cow and managed to move the hell away from one drive quite fast. Shame because the integration was so much better than dropbox (i.e. Files aren't downloaded until accessed and you can control how) and because their office suite is really miles better than competitors.
So you're bashing Microsoft for offering a cross platform solution on a Google account reliant device such as Android?
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?
As the on-site support of a group of older and disabled users (sight, hearing, motor, coordination, cognitive), the failures of Apple's traditionally highly accessible designs are quite familiar to me. I'd written my own rant a few months back after discovering (usability error) that Apple's online feedback form couldn't ingest the full thing:
If Chrome/Chromium wasn't written by, I assume, people with good (enough) eyesight, my 82 year old father would be using it instead of Firefox. Granted, this is on Linux, so maybe the accessibility story is better on Windows or maybe Apple (not played in that garden since the late '80s), but....
I know exactly what you mean. One technique I've used is to express things in terms of what they can uniquely get with the new system that relates to their needs. In the case of iPads, some of the accessibility benefits such as requiring less fine motor control may tip the balance in favor of adoption for some. Best of luck!
* '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 remember Windows 95 came with an interactive tutorial (with exercises) that explained how the mouse gestures worked and how to manipulate windows, files and folders and start up applications.
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.
Unfortunately (or not) the European version was just a five or ten minutes long session with a female vice over, a white background and some interactive exercises.
I'm gonna ask a different question - why Google is struggling to design useful software? It seems that every iteration of their every product loses functionality and is being dumbed down to the point of uselessness.
I think an obvious example is Hangouts. It's easily the worst messaging app I've used in years. It consistently fails at reliably delivering messages. It's very common for me to send a message on my laptop, and then have the response only show up on my phone, or vise versa. The read marker will often jump around, and people that just messaged me 3 minutes ago will have "last seen 5 hours ago" under their name.
Google chat was a product that reliably sent messages to people, told me if someone was online, and was fast, too.
That's interesting, I have the exact opposite experience. I use Hangouts regularly, on two Macs, a PC and on my Android phone and I have never experienced any of that stuff, except maybe the "last seen" being out of sync - but that's hardly a dealbreaker.
I used Hangouts intensively for video daily meetings throughout a software project that spanned for several months - on different machines (on my work laptop, mobile phone, sometimes my home PC).
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
I don't mind the presence inconsistencies, & the read marker only rarely "desyncs" for me, but the notifications are absolutely horrible. I chat on one device and replies trigger notifications on 3...drives me nuts sometimes.
Google seems to be leaning more toward "normal users"
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.
Shouldn't software (or anything else) be made optimal for the majority of people that will use it? With common apps like web-browsers, email, & chat, pushing everyone to become an advanced user is nonsense.
Somehow stoves, microwaves and machines live with complex interfaces and nobody complains. Cars are also a good example - it is expected of everyone to take a few dozen hours of driving lessons to familiarize themselves with the UI of the machine, and again, nobody complains. Creating the expectation that every program should be fully usable from the get-go is the problem, because the only way to achieve that is to remove its features to the point it barely does anything.
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.
I agree with your sentiment (a modern PC is a very complex beast and it's not reasonable to expect to be able to operate it without learning about it first), but my stove's interface could not be simpler. One turny knob. Turn it to pick the heat setting, from "OFF" to "LOTS". I don't think I've ever used a stove more complex than that.
I don't think I've ever used a stove more complex than that.
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)
The camera app on Nexus devices just has none of the features any vaguely competent photographer needs, and that's ignoring the crap API Google has made available. OpenCamera should be the stock app (well, with a slightly more sane settings page).
> managing their devices, or even just using basic software, is just getting too complicated.
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.
> So, with all of these factors at play and more changes to come, is there anyone out there who's doing clear and simple design well?
> 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).
Focusing on iTunes to argue that Apple can't design simple software anymore seems a little bit unfair, while on the other hand I understand that it might be the only Apple desktop software used by people who run on MS Windows.
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.
I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet. Then they won't let me sync a song via their cloud because it's a voice MP3 I bought ages ago and isn't high bitrate enough?! Kill. After much Googling all I could do was turn off apple music, sync to the device, re-add itunes music. IIRC there are two levels/types of cloud, one where you can add music and the other where you sync everything via it. Whatever, it's just something my mother shouldn't have to know about.
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.
>I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet.
You can turn off the iCloud Music Library and sync via cable
You cut out the part where they said: "After much Googling all I could do was turn off apple music, sync to the device".
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?
I did figure it out, but it wasn't obvious. It just seemed a weird interaction - take a long-standing and obvious feature away because they're pushing the iCloud service.
3D touch is a pain in the hole - always going off when I don't want it, and otherwise not really there whenever I do want to use it, to any useful degree. It's just another distraction for app developers too, away from creating value. I'd far rather the effort went into that went into providing a more stable dependable ecosystem.
I seem to remember seeing a lot of commenters in the iPhoneSE announcement thread saying that they'd completely forgotten that 3DTouch even existed. It may be "smoothly" integrated but so much so that nothing has visibly changed, nothing to indicate that there is a new feature or where it's usable.
It's like the first iteration 3DS, nintendo mandated that every game must also be able to run in 2d for compatibility and usability, so noone could really push the feature into new territory
I had a nightmare trying to free up space for an iPad software upgrade. I couldn't see what was backed up. The apple site had placeholder text in the area devoted to this topic. There was some way of syncing a folder with the contents of what was being backed up but this didn't work and there was no progress meter.
Yep, iTunes is a place where Apple tests new UI concepts against a rather complex data organizing problem, and its always been a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas.
The article mixes simple-to-use software with software which functionality is easy to discover. These are very different.
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.
I don't know about Google, I don't really use any of their products, other than search. As for Apple, it seems like their trying to make things simpler, but forget that people do development work on Macs. It's never huge things that bugs be, just minor tweaks Apple make, and sometimes half-baked features.
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.
For me what OS X provides is just great. Sane defaults, good UI, they're fine. It's what it doesn't provide that gets me, and Homebrew is a good effort and all, but too much hassle.
Interesting, it made my 2011 iMac feel sluggish, not all the time, but in weird bursts. I have code that consumes a fair bit of memory, it's pretty much non-functional on the Mac and you can't do other stuff while it runs, runs in a few minutes on Linux and just a little slower on Mavericks.
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".
The impression I have, in the humble projects and companies I work with, is that it's more related to the decision-makers.
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.
Balancing features and usability is one of the hardest problems product management has to face. Removing an existing feature is not a piece of cake, but companies are a bit too worried about it in my opinion.
The author must try a chromebook. (OT- the author should tell it to her newspapers webdevelopers to design things simple - 20 % tracking requests in washpost)
Part of the reason is not just the complicated infrastructure but also the huge amount of users you want to satisfy as market leader. You can't just focus on a niche. There are people who listen to music, people who watch movies, etc. So you can't just make your software manage music.
I also wonder why they are producing such mediocre software, with so many qualified people.
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.
I thought the article was going to be about how a lot of software seems to be dumbed down so that less technical users can use them but that the more tricky stuff is either hidden away or just not present at all. I was wrong.
Whenever somebody told me that 'Desktops are gonna be obsolete because smartphones' I always told them that screens on desktops have always gotten bigger so there is a demand for big things that are easy to work with but he won't listen because some article on some website said other wise.
smartphones are good for stay connected but not for actual 'doing stuff'.
And why should I care? I value truth far more than all that stupid politeness and tolerance to the inferior. If HN fundamental values are different I should stay as far away from it as possible.
I understand and sympathize with that position a lot, but it doesn't port to HN. It isn't that HN's fundamental values are different, it's that we operate under constraints.
Perhaps we can discuss this offline. I'll send you an email.
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.