Simplicity is the most Complex Feature!

I’ve been convinced for a long time that simplicity is the most important property of a product. Long-gone are the 90s when a product was admired for its complexity. But I am also convinced that this is the most complex property to achieve and maintain as time passes by.

A good example of an over-complex product is Atlassian JIRA, a bug tracker that also do scrum management and plenty of other things via dozens of plugins. It’s basically a toolbox to create the bug tracker adapted to your company.

In my previous job, I faced an uncomfortable situation with JIRA because of its complexity. We used it for bug tracking and scrum management and I tried to upgrade our old version to the latest one. After some long hours to upgrade our setup on a test server, I finally got the latest version working but most of our installed plugins were not available anymore because the authors did not port their plugins to the new plugin API. Of course each plugin was there for a reason and I was in a tricky situation: keep the old version with security issues or upgrade to a new version without our plugins. Continue reading…

Never, Ever, Hinder the Use of your Products!

One of the worst user experience I had with a software is with the Sony PS3. I kind of like this product, I found the user interface very nice and well organized… but they are much too agressive on upgrades! They simply block features until the upgrade is done!

A few weeks ago I wanted to watch a VOD movie with my wife. I launched the Playstation Store that asked me to upgrade the OS to the latest version. That’s 45 minutes before to be able to access the Playstation again! But wait! Once the new OS was installed, I tried to launch the Playstation Store again… This time this was the Playstation Application that was not up to date ! Continue reading…

Why Autocomplete in Twitter Mobile App Sucks

Autocomplete seems very easy, isn’t it? But most of mobile apps that implement it offer a pretty poor user experience.

Let’s look at the twitter mobile application. It proposes autocompletion when you create a new tweet. The idea is to make suggestions after the ‘#’ and ‘@’ characters. It’s actually very nice to gain time, especially when you’re tweeting with a small virtual keyboard… but it sucks!

Avoid Roundtrips to Server for Autocompletion

The first reason is that when you’re on the go, latency is often too high on mobile, leading to unusable autocomplete – well except if you’re very slow to type. Twitter developers chose to develop this functionality server-side, probably with lucene, and to expose it via APIs to their mobile app. That’s good for reusability but not so much for usability…

Beware of the Suggestions Ranking

The second reason is the ranking is just obscure. Yesterday I sent a tweet to @cocoanetics and the screenshot on the left shows the suggestions I got when typing “@c”. I would greatly prefer to see twitter handles before names and it would never come to my mind to look for “Marie Cecile” with “@c”! Continue reading…

The Ordeal of Obtaining an Apple Developer Professional Account

I recently had a pretty bad user experience when I upgraded my personal apple developer account into a professional one.

To sum up, we officially created Algolia in early October and I decided to convert my personal Apple Developer Account in order to have our applications published under the “Algolia” name. This process is not available online but after a quick call people at Apple sent me the link for the process. It is actually pretty simple: they just need you to fill some information about your company and to accept their EULA. Continue reading…