I'm working on a post about some changes to my snapshot strategy that I have recently made, however in the meantime, I have run across another annoying pattern coming from modern application developers, and wanted to rant about it for a few minutes.
A couple of years ago, I noticed that more and more applications, specifically web apps, seem to present without a horizontal scroll bar. You basically have to run your browser full screen, otherwise, the information just runs off of the right side of the browser. My conclusion was that modern developers are from a generation that grew up looking at apps on their phones, where you can only use one app at a time. Unfortunately, they seem to not take into account that some of us have very large monitors, and do multiple tasks, and covet our screen real estate. I have a 3440x1440 monitor on my mac for work, and 3840x2160 on my desktop, and both are entirely too much screen real estate to be wasting on a full-screen browser session.
More recently, I noticed that established applications that behave in one way get an update, and a marked decrease in usability. The first showed up in bitwarden. They changed the interface. Originally, it was set up so going to a website and attempt to log in with credentials stored in your bitwarden vault, pull-down menu has a login item. Clicking anywhere along the open area of the entry would send said credentials to the site.
Somewhere along the way (about 1 year ago), they changed the behavior, and added a blue "Fill" button in the entry for the site. Clicking in any open area in the entry takes you to the display/edit of the entry, instead of prior behavior. You have to click in the Fill button in order to log in. What strikes me as asinine about this arrangement is that 90 to 95% of the time, you are attempting to log in to a site and 5 to 10%, you need to edit entries. So why not make the larger space login and if you feel the need to create a button for something (which I don't feel they needed to), make it a View or Edit button.
I also have an iphone for work. Their last update, they did the same thing. In earlier versions of ios, if you go into the calls icon, you used to be able to call a number in the list by just tapping the line with the number. Since the latest update, if you tap the number, it will put you into view mode, and to call the number, you have to tap the phone handset icon, *and then confirm that you really want the phone to make the call, so two extra taps. There is now a call icon on each entry, like the fill button in bitwarden.
Who thought that was a good idea??? What is the thought process for these companies? "We have their money or we have most of the market share, so what if usability suffers?" Microsoft has adopted this mindset, as have gnome and others... Somehow, it seems that giving your users the finger in the usability department would somehow drive them to use something else.
I just encountered a new wrinkle to this usabililty conundrum. My bank, with whom I think I have been with them for 15 years, has been amazing. However, it seems like every time they update their software, it feels like one step forward, 2 steps back.
For example, they updated their online bill pay recently, and now, instead of being able to just go in and adjust a detail about the payment of the bill, you have to delete the payment and re-add it with the updated information. I don't blame the bank, since they are probably using a canned banking webapp. However the authors of that webapp have apparently come down on the side of visual interest over usability...In other words, "we took away functionality, but doesn't it look purtty???"
Oy Vei...