Twatatalk

[King Sad]

What the hell is happening with this? Every update they change the interface and now it is totally unusable - harrumph - rant over

[Kevy427]

A lot of app developers seem to be doing this of late. Something is working perfectly well then they deem it necessary to 'improve the user experience' and make things worse just to justify their jobs. I think the technical term is 'buggering it up' and is a direct descendant of 'Mandering'


Sent from my dungeon

[Moff]

Mandering, however, seems to have a clear end game; the Tapatalk developers nailed the product years ago and are slowly trashing it.

Sent from my Vodafone Smart ultra 6 using Tapatalk

[IanM]

A lot of app developers seem to be doing this of late. Something is working perfectly well then they deem it necessary to 'improve the user experience' and make things worse just to justify their jobs. I think the technical term is 'buggering it up' and is a direct descendant of 'Mandering'

And doubly ironically given my job, I'm heavily against this current trend. Tapatalk have been guilty of this for a long time. Strava have been getting in on it recently too. I'm all for UI change for the right reasons, but not rapid fire changes that show no strong design leadership!

[Jack Hughes]

The only sense I can make of it is that they're trying to change all the arbitrary forums into a integrated Twitter style platform which they control and can therefore monetize in some way - ie stick adverts on, direct traffic to content while charging the content providers etc.

I long stopped using it as it became impossible. Just leave it on got the Notifications.

[Bopomofo]

I've not played with it for ages... what are they doing? Trying to integrate everything into a single feed, Twitter Style?

Any ideas if they ever stuck some kind of integrator back-end in the system? I always assumed it was just a client that could speak various forum languages?

But I can see that if they want to stick a back-end in there, add in click-through crap etc then they'll want their own integrated UI. Then they can develop it to various platforms and have a single, common corporate look. Which may be shite.


As Ian and Kevy say, there's a lot of this going on. Sadly, too much of it is based on somebody in marketing, or worse, engineering, saying "I reckon it would be better THIS way" and enforcing their own understandings.

At my work we do an utter shit-load of gathering user data to inform decisions before we decide to fix something that is already working just fine. We can look at REALLY detailed stuff like how many times our users select option x or y, which menus get used most/least, which menus have people driving around looking for stuff... then we can try to float it to the surface. They key question that gets asked for any software product/feature proposal is "What known end-user complaint is this going to fix?"...

...closely followed by "How does it make us money?"

Yes, Strava have been fixing something that worked. Endomondo have too... although I wish they'd directed the effort at their Android Wear app which is execrable. Mind you, a lot of wearable apps are utter shite at the moment: there is a much higher percentage of them that have utterly ignored the "What known end-user complaint is this going to fix?", and that's a statement that is OS agnostic. If I'm honest, the whole wearable market has slightly failed to answer that question.

Having said that, since I had my smart-watch nicked I am kind of missing it...

[Kevy427]

Having said that, since I had my smart-watch nicked I am kind of missing it...

Not so smart is it now?!

Sorry to read about your theft; what happened? Is there a way of disabling it remotely like you can with an, er, you know, what do you call it...? That's right, an iDevice

I'm sure some of these app designers are creating solutions to problems which don't exist™Dragon's Den