Hey Bing, iOS isn't Windows Phone 7

The Bing app for iOS was decent, until recent updates. It looks like someone at Microsoft decided they needed to make the Bing app for iOS look and feel more like a Windows Phone 7 app. So they did, and the result is an ugly, unusable disaster.

On Windows Phone 7, buttons look like traditional 'labels', but in lower-case font. Clickable elements are very subtly different from text, but yet it's obvious what is clickable and what isn't. The hardware 'back' button, standard on all phones, is used to dismiss modal dialogs. That's how the native interface of the phone (called 'Metro', I believe) is, and it all comes together quite beautifully. Here's what a menu on a native Windows Phone 7 app looks like:



On iOS, buttons looks like, well, buttons. Clickable elements have depth and curves and are strikingly different from text/labels. There is no hardware back button, so Apple has provided built-in buttons with system fonts and colors which are placed on the top right corner to dismiss modal dialogs. Just like Windows Phone 7, it's well thought out, coherent and comes together beautifully. Here's how menus, buttons and dialogs look on iOS.

Good apps follow Human Interface Guidelines of the platform they're built for, which gives them consistency with the rest of the system and makes interactions with the application intuitive. For some reason, the developers/designers of the Bing iOS app decided to follow the Human Interface Guidelines for Windows Phone 7 for their iOS app, instead of following the iOS HIG guidelines, and the result is just awful.

Below is what a modal menu on the Bing app looks like on my iPhone (the rest of the app looks similar, and has the same flaws). I have been using apps on my iPhone for two years and yet it took me several minutes to figure out what I needed to do on that dialog. It wasn't obvious how to toggle options on the menu, nor was it obvious how I could dismiss the dialogs. It took me a good two minutes to realize that the 'done' label was infact a button, and that almost everything on that screen was clickable, except the tiny header that reads "MENU". The font size on that label (page header) is smaller than that on the label-buttons, which sounds inverted, and makes the page look ugly.

Compare this with the image below and notice how obvious and beautiful some of those same options are on the native iPhone mapping application. (This isn't a modal dialog on the native app - if it was, I can guarantee that there would be a blue 'Done' button in the top right corner).

In fact, the entire experience of using the Bing app is so jarring that I refuse to use it at all, in spite of some of its nifty features. And I would be very surprised if I'm the only one who feels that way. It literally feels like Microsoft ported an app that is likely beautiful and usable on Windows Phone 7 to iOS without putting any thought into iOS usability. In fact, my guess is that the developers spent more time trying to make those buttons and table-views looks like Windows Phone 7 than they would have if they just used what the system provided with minor tweaks.

I cannot come up any reasonable explanation for why the designers of Bing chose to do this. If they want their application to be used, I sincerely hope they fix it soon.

On Mediocre Software - Where is the Love?

A recurring theme in some of the feedback we've seen for Audiogalaxy in reviews and direct feedback from users is how surprised they are when everything just works. A lot of the praise that the product has received goes something like this:

"Having tried and failed with several similar products I was shocked that when I used Audiogalaxy, it worked! No long delays, no dropping back to the initial screen, no anything wrong, just the music playing for as many hours as I needed."

"It does exactly what it's supposed to do. How often do you see that?"

"I never write reviews because most apps usually suck, but this is... different."

I won't feign modesty - we've worked pretty hard to make sure that Audiogalaxy works well. But that's not the point of this post. What statements like the ones above imply is that users are accustomed to underwhelming software. Most people, it seems, approach new software products with skepticism and wariness. Having been bitten by bad software several times in the past, they have become conditioned to assume the worst, and to be surprised when software works as it's expected to. While this might be true of other things too, in this case it points to a collective failure of the software development community. Commoditization of software developers/development and easy software distribution channels seem, on the surface, a boon to the software industry but are also a root cause for this mediocrity that people seem to now expect.

A telling sign of how extensive this perception is the following email I received from a friend after he used Audiogalaxy:

"Frankly speaking, my expectations were not very high. I was like, 'it's gonna be yet another process sucking the life out of my machine'. I was expecting to spend at least 30 minutes configuring everything, but was pretty much done in a couple of clicks and listening to music in a couple of minutes. It blew away my expectations in terms of how light weight it was (like 5 MB of memory and close to 0-1% cpu) and also super responsive in the browser to!!!"

On the surface, this comment seems to fall into the same bucket at the others above. However, this friend is actually a really good software developer himself. So this default notion of 'crappy software' isn't just users' perception. It is a dirty insider secret - we know about it, we expect it and yet we just suck it up and deal with it.

It's time to fix this, my fellow software geeks. You may say that people will vote with their money, and that bad software will fall by the wayside, and that the wheat will separate from the chaff, yada yada... All that may be true. But by producing crappy software, we're diluting the value of software as a whole, which eventually trickles down and affects each one of us.

Now this is the part of the post where I really should offer a silver bullet that will 'fix it all' and permanently change users' perceptions. Alas, I'll leave that to folks who are smarter than I. The one thing that I've learnt in my short career, and the only advise I can offer is this:

Build software with love, nurture it with care, take pride in its successes and share blame in its failures.

This mantra won't make you write bug free code or automatically make your software user friendly overnight - that's what experience, skills, iteration and good engineering practices are for. Heck, no software developer is anywhere close to writing 100% bug-free code. However, it will guide you in making decisions that lead to good, solid software which does what it says and says what it does. After all, software isn't just code - it is the culmination of every decision made in its journey from its inception to its current state.

A world where bad software/technology is an anomaly, not the norm, would be a good world - and it starts with us.