There's no shortage of good-looking apps these days. But spend five minutes on Hacker News or reddit and you'll probably find at least one of these things:
- A new app that puts a fresh coat of paint on something that had been completely ordinary until the developers got their grubby paws on it.
- A short, pointed complaint about how some app or other "sucks" or is "unusable."
- A redesign of said app.
- A self-righteous blog post about user experience patterns.
A lot of the things that are going around are actually quite aesthetically pleasing. iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and the web have all come a long way since the era of Under Construction GIFs and webrings, and have each refined their graphic languages and interaction guidelines to some semblance of an "intuitive interface."
Why are so many people not happy with their beautiful apps?
The complaints usually fall into two categories: a function that isn't present or was removed, or a gesture or view that doesn't do what the person thinks it should do.
The first kind of complaint is hard to address. It's a delicate balance between what the developer thinks is a good use of time, what the users want to do, and why the developer disagrees with the users about what's important to have.
The second complaint is, in my opinion, unnecessary and frivolous. It's a matter of fit and trim, of fashion. Much like having a different hairstyle (if you are the kind of person who has short hair), it has little to no impact on your daily lifestyle, but it rubs your fur the wrong way when it gets long.
You can't please everyone. Each person will have a personal style, and no developer can match them all. In all likelihood, people may only ever agree on what they don't want your app to do: show annoying full-screen ads, sell their personal information to the highest bidder, etc.
Since it's next to impossible to give everyone what they want, we've come up with a couple of remedies:
- F*ck you, I'm the developer. Deal with it.
- Settings for all the things. But that's too much work. We could be redoing the image assets. That's much more productive. Don't like the way we set our priorities? See remedy 1.
- The great thing about apps is that there are so many of them from which to choose. Oh wait, we have all your data and we aren't sharing. See remedy 1.
I'm not convinced these are the users' sole remedies against the app model that makes them so unhappy. Maybe we developers should focus on making the functions that users need and let them do their own graphic design. After all, they seem to know what's best for themselves...