App

I once again watched the presentation of the first iPhone on YouTube. I watch it once in a while since it is iconic and I simply like the way Steve Jobs gave presentations back then. This time I saw something I haven’t noticed before. After he introduced the iPhone, the iPhone is connected to the presentation and he shows the call app, how to watch videos, how to play and rate music, how to move through cover flow and how to scroll contacts. At one time he opens a detail page in the iPod app (i.e. music app), similar like my amazing drawing: From the left list view you can access the right detail view by tapping on one of the list items. At all times the right-most tab is selected (that’s why it’s highlighted in orange). Then you can go back - as we all know - by tapping on the back button in the top left corner (indicated by the dotted arrow). In most cases, you’re also able to do a swipe gesture from the left border of the screen to the right to trigger the back navigation. With the tab bottom bar ¹ the iPod app provides a third navigation method. Tapping on the already selected tab to pop everything from the navigation stack besides the top most view of the tab. This is different behaviour compared to the back button and the swipe gesture for a navigation stack of size > 2. For a single detail view (navigation stack of 2), all three methods behave the same. Coming back to the presentation, at one point Steve Jobs chooses to tap on the tab instead of using the back button² which somehow is kind of not ideal.

What is the reason for introducing a delete slide option in the update available section in the iOS App Store, Apple? Not only is it confusing, as it’s unclear wheter I can delete the available update or delete the whole app¹, but it’s also inconsistent in its implementation: should I wait until an app get’s an update until I can uninstall it? Why would you even think about putting the slide option there? It just reminds me of all the other list item slide options out there that were never discovered by any user.

When you open a popup , you want to be able to change the selection without taking your finger off the screen (i.e. just by dragging your finger to the option you want). I recently started tracking my spendings with a budget book app called Splid . This app has not implemented this small, yet important feature. I tried to capture this in this gif. I select an option, swipe my finger up and down and try to select another option. Only when I release my finger can I select the second option.

In my previous post I wrote about Spotify’s bad refresh process on its app’s home tab. In this post it’s about one of Spotify’s most important views, the media player, and the button to add and remove songs¹ from the user’s library.

Users Complaining and Spotify’s Challenge

Users are always complaining about Spotify’s UI changes . I understand both sides:

Spotify is on of my most used apps in my daily life. You could call it my daily driver. While the Spotify Desktop experience became mostly stable and decent in recent years the design decisions for the Spotify mobile apps are rather ux disasters.

The Problem

Below is a typicial Spotify iPhone App startup.. looks all right (besides the long loading time), doesn’t it..?