Design decisions that shouldn’t exist in 2022
We are living in the age of information where technology has deeply integrated into our society. Digital products are being meticulously designed by multidisciplinary teams, solving complex problems using humane design principles. Apps and software have matured in the past decade and have now become a craft. It is therefore shocking and oftentimes infuriating when modern apps fail to deliver some simple things. Let’s look at some bewildering product design choices still plaguing us in 2022.
1. How Apple snoozed on snooze
Apple is not the first name that comes to mind when someone talks about bad design. On the contrary, the company is regarded as the gold standard. However, once we take a magnified look at some of the iOS stock apps we see how prevalent bad design is.
At first glance, Apple’s native clock app looks like the perfect mix of minimalist beauty and essentialist utility. Everything seems perfect until you try to snooze your next morning alarm. Apple by default provides 9 mins as the snooze time but does not provide any setting to change that. It’s odd to think that Apple would miss out on such a trivial feature and what’s even odder ( no pun intended ) is the choice of 9 minutes as the default.
Whatever the reason may be, it doesn’t look like Apple wants to change it as this feature was still missing after the app redesign of the latest iOS. Apple loyalists are sadly stuck to adding 15 alarms instead.
2. Spotify’s broken download system
Another titan in the modern UX space is Spotify. It came in and disrupted a stagnant music industry with fresh visual choices. Spotify was also among the first to push the narrative of app design as a craft establishing a great blog where the team explains the rationale behind the decisions taken and also goes into more nuanced posts by experienced experience designers.
Knowing all of this, it’s puzzling why Spotify doesn’t allow a user to download individual songs. The only way to download songs is to download either an entire album or a playlist. Although the workaround is obvious and easy, it still is a workaround. It’s annoying when you have to download the entire Hamilton to jam to “My Shot”
3. Twitter’s resistance to edit itself
Probably the most famous (or rather infamous) example of companies not solving an obvious issue is Twitter and the edit button. Since the inception of Twitter, patrons of the platform are begging to add an edit button. The issue has become a parody in itself. Twitterati and Twitter itself regularly make fun of the triviality of an edit button.
The solution to this one however is not as simple as adding an edit button. Since twitter’s power as a platform comes from its ability to provide real-time data for various purposes, it becomes a very complex problem. Hopefully, Elon Musk can figure this one out and give people what they want.
Closing Thoughts
It’s surprising to see that even mature products have flaws. The reality is product development is really difficult as it tries to balance multiple stakeholders’ interests to reach the best possible solution. It’s also tough to cater to every use case and account for the extreme users.
That being said there are some product misses, that frustrate users more than others. It’s important to figure out and prioritize these pain points. It’s also important to design for both normal use cases and extreme use cases as the product evolves. Designing for delight is important, but sometimes, designing for annoyance prevention might be more important.
Canvs Editorial regularly brings you insightful reads on design and anything related. Check out the work we do at Canvs Club.
The Canvs Editorial team comprises of Editorial Writer and Researcher — Sidhant Tibrewal, the Editor’s Desk- Aalhad Joshi and Debprotim Roy, and Content Operations- Abin Rajan
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