#comments

I’ve been frustrated, recently, by a few apps that don’t tell you what they’re doing. At this moment, I’m currently annoyed by two iPhone apps, but I see this problem elsewhere and on the desktop as well. The problem is either frustrating or else causes me to have less faith in the accuracy of the app, depending on what’s happening.

In the first case, I’m having issues with Bolt Reader. In general I like it, although it seems to be quite crashy on me these days. But it does this thing that is so freaking annoying. After you click into a post to get back to the list you hit the back button. Apparently, if you hit the back button twice it brings you back to the top of the list – whereas hitting it just once brings you back to where you left off.

That’s all well and good, I can’t really imagine wanting to get back to the top of the list, but whatever choices are good I guess. Unfortunately, when you press the back button the transition back to the list is not quick and worse than that, after you click it, nothing seems to happen. No indication that you’ve clicked it, no indication that it’s trying to do something and the pause between click and action isn’t a constant. So, despite being pretty sure you clicked it – sometimes you lose faith and think maybe it didn’t register and you go and push it again only to find yourself at the top of a list of 200 posts where you have to scroll through reams and reams of pages to get back to where you were.

All that would be needed to remedy this would be a little “in process” indicator that let the user know that wheels were in motion and patience would pay off. This is the first category of indicator – anytime some action is going to take awhile, it’s incredibly important to let the user in on the fact that the app is working on it. Otherwise, if things don’t look different how can a user know that they’re being attended to? The lack of this indicator breeds frustration and annoyance.

The other app that’s been getting on my nerves is Google Maps for the iPhone! Actually, I love this app, on my 3G iPhone, it’s location awareness is super cool. The thing that bothers me, though, is it’s traffic mapiness. I’ve noticed that it never, ever agrees on traffic with maps.google.com. It’s always quite different – but there’s no way in maps to try to refresh the traffic maps. On the desktop version, you can shift-reload the page, you can try and play around with the browser – also crappy ways of handling this, but still, it’s possible. On the iPhone… I don’t know if I can do that, I get the feeling that it’s pulling the traffic from some cache or other.

Without any indicator of when it was last updated or at least the ability to ensure a recent refresh of the data, it makes me really doubt what I’m seeing in the app. This is the other type of indicator – recency. Any app that shows live or updating data needs a way to let the user know that what they are seeing is in fact the most updated data. It’d be nice to see a timestamp for this, but for some apps maybe it’s not possible or it doesn’t make sense – but then just throwing in a button to get the data is good enough. Something. Alas, with iPhone Maps, I simply don’t trust the traffic data anymore.