Breaking existing usability

One of the things that is most fascinating with usability is how perfectly working products can be rendered less useful by "improvements."

Just a few examples of this.

First out is Apple. When you access their quick and dirty app Notes on iOS, it is not as quick but quite as dirty as one would expect. One cannot currently get around the selection of folders. When I open the app, I have one folder in one location, and yet, Apple forces me to select it to see its content.

One can see why this would be useful for people who use this app (in spite of the fact that it lacks history and trash to recover lost data), and who have their notes in a large number of folders, which they all access frequently. But for users like me, who have only eleven notes altogether, it is just another way to discourage me from using the app.

It didn't use to be like this. Before Notes introduced folders, the app was quick and easy to use.


The next one is Google docs in iOS, who falls into the common trap of proposing unnecessary templates. In the lower right corner of docs, there is a friendly plus sign in plenty of colours that invites you to create a new document.

However, when you click on it, you do not get a new blank doc. Google takes the opportunity to insert another step on the road, an option to use a template:

This means that one is give one more opportunity to forget the bright idea one wanted to write down, before one can actually start typing. The step didn't use to be there. Google introduced it with the introduction of templates some time ago.

To be fair to google, the concept is not only theirs. Both Apple Pages and Microsoft Words by default provide a lot of templates that may be of use to some people. However, both Apple and Microsoft allow the users to switch off the extra step to become productive straight away.


Another commonly introduced degradation is unwanted internet connections. If you use Apple's text editor TextEdit in MacOS with a slow internet connection, you know what this is about. To save a new document, or even to close a document without saving, one will pass the save dialog, which for some reason connects to the internet. If there is a time out, you could actually fail in closing a document you want to discard. Apple introduced this risk for failure to make certain things easier, like saving to internet locations, but for some users in come contexts it is just plain annoying.


That was my moaning of the day.