[aliston]

What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me...

As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?

[doctorpangloss]

This is a stylized comment.

It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for.

Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff.

Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI.

> why do you think collaborative design works so poorly?

To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!

[yawnxyz]

(I’m a UX engineer but not at Spotify)

It’s always been wild to me how incongruous / inconsistent the experience of using Spotify’s web/ios/android apps have been. It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess, but maybe it also shows that Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet of addressing org level communication and syncing with prod assets

[gibbitz]

I don't like spotify's UX much either, but I don't blame my hammer for the lopsided chairs I built. Plenty of crappy UIs were designed in Adobe Photoshop before Sketch came around and introduced tooling better suited for UX mockups. It's not the tool it's poor product and experience development you're complaining about.

[aliston]

Wow, I hadn't thought about it through that lens exactly, but you are 100% right. Virtually everyone in large organizations (engineers, PMs, designers) are incentivized to launch things that align with their end-of-year performance goals. Those goals are sometimes at odds with the best overall customer outcome.

I hadn't thought about figma specifically as being a symptom. I'm sure some organizations use it effectively, but I can see how it might spiral out of control to result in an "I'm helping too" sort of ethos, with a poor net outcome.

[remoquete]

As a UX writer, the ability of providing feedback or editing UI text before a disastrous piece of Loren Ipsum goes to production is very, very valuable. What's the feedback you think is silly here?

[jbl0ndie]

I believe that's what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshittification'. I don't blame UX designers and Figma for it though, and I think this comes from the corporate stakeholders rather than the PMs. Full disclosure, I'm a PM similarly annoyed by the enshittification of once excellent apps. Maybe too many large companies are stuck releasing features on a regular cadence without many interesting user problems to solve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#%3A%7E%3Atext...

[tanepiper]

Google Maps is the worst for this - the only application that has nearly killed me several times.

[olau]

If you read The Design of Design Fred Brooks talks about the perils of trying to have multiple people design something.