Not only that, in the past, your Artists and Albums page would show all artists/albums in your "liked" list, even if it was one or two tracks. Used to be able to play all the songs you did like, but now it only shows whole albums liked, or whole artists liked. Those two pages are entirely neutered, and I have zero use for them now, and find it really difficult to browse for a random artist to listen to, of just their stuff I like. Their UX gets worse every update. I miss the era of non-updating apps. Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?
> Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?
I generally assign the problem of "change for the sake of change" to the UX developers, at least at any significantly large company. Once a company gets large enough, you're employment is no longer justified by the quality of your work. You justify it by shipping product features, enhancements, and fixes. So UX developers can't sit back and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.
Perhaps I don't understand the UX developer role enough, but I would imagine it involves research and user engagement. Perhaps the role is then too narrowly defined? I liked the comment about Word's competitor being the previous version, so that changing the UI/UX would need to provide tangible user benefits. I think Microsoft lacks some of that these days (early Windows 11 builds have been proof of that failing in my experience thus far).
