Charles Dickens nailed it. We live in the best of times. Technological marvels we could never have dreamed up surround us in abundance. They also frustrate the living heck out of us, causing us to believe we live in the worst of times. This particular rant comes close to being yet another listicle, which is a made up word that annoys me. If you choose to flee to the nearest exit, I understand. I’d probably do that myself, but if you have the fortitude to endure more of my nonsense, here it is:
Apps is short for Applications, which is a fancy way of saying programs. Although we call our pocket supercomputers phones, we actually spend far more time using the many apps we’ve crammed into them than we do on phone calls.
I make apps for iPhones and iPads. You might immediately leap to the conclusion that this makes me a millionaire or better. The truth is that I might be a hundred-aire if such a category existed. For me it’s enjoyable, keeps me busy, and sometimes pays for coffee. Like all app developers, I have sinned from time to time. Transgressions I have committed include:
Putting an icon on a button that seems painfully obvious to me, but is obscure and meaningless to every person who attempts to use the app.
Forgetting to take dark mode into consideration, causing entire screens to disappear after sundown.
Displaying information in a field that is so small that it gets lopped off if the font is made bigger.
My point is that I’m not perfect, nor do I claim to be anything more than barely adequate. Having said that, I have encountered numerous apps, made by huge companies with lots of highly paid and skilled programmers, that could, and should, be time saving assistants making my life better. Instead they have inexplicable, and inexcusable, characteristics that make me want to hurl my phone to the ground with great force. Let’s start with the bank apps.
I’m sure your bank, like mine, has urged you to go “paperless” and get everything by email. Given the postal service propensity for delivering my mail to random addresses, I do prefer to have my financials come to me by email. The banks, to their credit, do go out of the way to alert me. I’ll get an email heralding the arrival of the latest statement. And a text. I think they may also have sent a carrier pigeon, but maybe it was taken by a hawk. In any case, they let me know that I have a new statement, available simply by opening their app.
Once the app has confirmed my identity, I am presented with the initial screen. The word Statements does not appear on that screen. Instead I am greeted with the paltry sums remaining in my account and a menu of options:
Snapshot just shows me what my money was wasted on. Insights, which might be an oblique way of presenting my statement, suggests I might like a tutorial on buying stocks. Profile lets me know who I am and where I live, which on some days might be useful, but has no statement button. Explore lets me see all the many services available to me as a valued bank customer, but nothing even close to the fabled statement. By my Sherlock Holmes process of elimination, I reckon it must be a Task! I choose that option and get this array of choices:
None of those options seems related to a statement, but I try each one anyway. Then I go deeper into the labyrinth by selecting 8 More Tasks. That presents more options:
There it is, the Holy Grail of tasks! Chucked in at the bottom of the list, like an afterthought. It produces yet another menu, allowing me to pick which statement I would like to view, within the past 7 years. At least now I understand why it’s under Tasks, because finding it is a task worthy of Hercules.
I also have issues with the evil step-sisters of banks, the credit card apps. They start out nice enough, with a login screen. Your login name may already be filled in. Isn’t that nice?
So you login, recoiling in horror at how much money has been spent by yourself or a loved one, and do whatever business you needed to do. At that point you could just close the app, and resume your life. But every day the news features yet another business that has been hacked and metric tons of data extracted and splashed around on the infamous dark web. If you don’t log out properly you may be leaving a door open that will result in your account being strip mined by a nefarious hacker group in Lower Obscuria. Let’s log out.
At this point you may discover, as I have in many an app, that the button for logging out is nowhere to be found. I find myself in full Indiana Jones mode, frantically searching for the elusive Sign Off button. Eventually I discover it on the Profile page, which is where I enter my name, address, and other vital information. It’s at the very bottom of the list of options, but it’s also prominently displayed at the top of that page, mocking my ineptitude.
My health insurance app also plays Hide and Seek with the sign out button, using a more sophisticated technique. There is a nice Menu button on the bottom of the screen that slides up a lengthy menu of options that partially obscures the Log Out button at the top of the screen. In the previous incarnation of this atrocity the button was found in the Settings list. The supreme irony is that this particular app is designed for those of us on their Medicare Advantage program. That means the average user is at least 65 years old, unlikely to be computer-experienced, and possibly having dodgy vision and memory issues. But they do politely ask at login if I would like to complete a survey when I sign off. I’ve agreed to do so more than once, but the promised survey never appears.
Perhaps you don’t find these shortcomings of your apps to be as annoying as I do. It is the very nature of being an app developer that leads to an abnormally low tolerance for shortcomings in any app I have not created myself. To quote my eldest son, also an app developer, “Hell is other people’s code.” Before I leave you to ponder how you might have better spent the time you lost reading this, I submit my own solution to this tragic problem. If this were the required HOME screen for all apps, I would be a happy camper indeed.
The plague is the guy who designed all this, Jim. I'll stop there....