I was out today, making heavy use of my phone to assist with some part-time courier work I’ve picked up recently. At some point during the day, the Google Maps app updated, at which point it felt the need to give me a tutorial.
Nothing, so far as I can tell, has changed in the Google Maps app since its last iteration, so quite why it felt the need to deliver an irritating and persistent tutorial is beyond me.
Google Maps isn’t the only app to do this. Pretty much any “productivity” app on mobile these days feels the need to bore you with a pointless (and often non-skippable) slideshow before you can start using it — even in the most simplistic apps.
I get why these tutorials are put in there — it’s to cater to stupid people and/or the technologically disinclined, who might not be familiar with the conventions of interface design. But they should be skippable. And if the app has clearly been on the device — and used heavily — prior to the latest update, it should automatically skip the tutorial by default.
And while we’re on, I can do without pointless, unnecessary updates, too, even though App Store, Google Play and Steam reviewers seem to think that they’re essential to an app or game remaining useful and/or fun. (These people never lived through an age where your word processor came on a floppy disk, and that was it, no more updates unless you shelled out for a new version.) These people are the reason why we get stupid, idiotic revamps to things that worked perfectly well the way they did before, like Twitter and Google Hangouts.
The latter is one I find particularly irritating, particularly in its Chrome extension incarnation. Previously, the Chrome extension was a discreet little affair that took the pop-up Google Hangouts interface from GMail and rendered it in an “always on top” version that could sit on your desktop — tucked away when you didn’t need it, yet just a mouseover away when you did.
Now, however, it’s in its own separate window for no apparent reason — a window that opens up every time you start Chrome, whether or not you have new messages to read — and, presumably in an attempt to “look like Android”, it has one of those annoying mobile-style “drawer” menus on the left. These are fine on mobile as they’re built to be usable with a touch interface, but on the big screen they’re clumsy and unnecessary. I honestly don’t know why we don’t still use drop-down menus any more; they may look boring, but they work. At least Mac OS still uses drop-down menus for most apps, though Office for Mac still has that horrible “Ribbon” thing at the top instead of the old-school toolbar from early versions of Office.
Updates are fine when they add something meaningful: look at something like Final Fantasy XIV, which adds meaningful new content with every major version number update. But when they’re change for change’s sake — like Hangouts’ new format, and Twitter’s insistence on reordering your timeline even when you have repeatedly asked it not to — they’re just annoying. And, moreover, that inexperienced audience the developers were hoping to capture with their tutorials will likely end up being turned off by having to “re-learn” their favourite app every few weeks.
And don’t even get me started on the three system restarts I did the other day, with a notification that there were new Windows updates available every time. At least I managed to excise the cancer that is the Windows 10 nag prompt, so I should be grateful for small victories, I guess.