Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Monday June 05 2017, @05:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the ask-siri dept.

As Apple prepares to show off new features for the iPhone and other devices at its developer conference on Monday, the company is grappling with an uncomfortable issue: Many of its existing features are already too complicated for many users to figure out.

At last year’s conference, for example, Apple’s top software executive, Craig Federighi, demonstrated how users could order food, scribble doodles and send funny images known as stickers in chats on its Messages app. The idea was to make Messages, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, into an all-purpose tool like China’s WeChat.

But the process of finding and installing other apps in Messages is so tricky that most users have no idea they can even do it, developers and analysts say.

Source: The New York Times

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday June 05 2017, @03:13PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday June 05 2017, @03:13PM (#520777)

    The root of the problem is capitalism, I think. These devices and UIs are becoming mature, but instead of just focusing on making them more reliable and fixing the bugs and other things that users don't notice much unless they run into them, and which don't help sell new devices (since software updates can and should be done for existing devices) they're piling on more features to get consumers to buy a new phone every 2 years. And of course, throwing more features in means lots more bugs and more problems as we see here (people don't know how to use all this unnecessary crap).

    We see less of this in the FOSS world, because for many projects, once it's feature-complete, the developers go do something else and the project goes into maintenance mode. How much new development is happening in busybox, for instance? Or nano (the editor)? Even the Linux kernel doesn't have *that* much new development; parts that are mature haven't changed in ages, though they are adding new parts to handle new hardware, or virtualization, etc. (Sadly, the desktop environments still haven't settled down, as seen with KDE5, shitty Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. I wonder how it'd be different if the Gnome devs weren't employed full-time by Red Hat.)

    The root of the problem is people needing to justify their existence, and companies wanting people to buy new versions of stuff they already have. With the latter, they make completely unnecessary UX changes and feature additions to get more sales, and with the former, you have people willing to do these jobs, and also people inside the company pushing for this stuff (new UXs etc.) because that gives them something to do and justifies their salary.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3