The Most Frustrating App on My iPhone These Days

There's one app that frustrates me most on my iPhone these days.

The Photos app.

With only slight exaggeration:

I could build something better with my feet. Heh.

What a photos app has to do is actually simple.

View photos,

find them,

organize them,

edit them,

share them,

delete them.

That's it.

But Apple has made this simple job strangely complicated.

Collections, Memories, Trips, People, Media Types, Albums, Pinned items, Suggestions.

I came in to find my photo,

and Apple keeps trying to recompose my photos its own way before showing them to me.

I just want to look at my photos,

and the app keeps forcing some “experience” on me.

That's the strangest part.

The protagonist of a photos app is not the UI.

It's the photos.

Good UX should keep the user from being conscious of the interface at all.

You shouldn't have to puzzle over where things are,

you shouldn't have to learn which menu to press,

you should just be able to do what you want, naturally.

But today's Photos app requires the user to understand the app's structure.

You're not finding photos —

you're studying the Photos app.

If it were at least beautiful, maybe.

To my eye, it isn't even that pretty.

So what's left, in the end, is

inconvenience,

complexity,

low user control,

and ambiguous design.

The Apple of the past had a strong image as the company that made complex things simple.

But lately it sometimes feels like the exact opposite.

It takes simple things and insists on making them complicated.

Packing in features

and building good UX are entirely different problems.

For a photos app, the goal should be clear.

Let users see the photo they want

as fast as possible,

find it as fast as possible,

manage it as fast as possible.

That's all it takes.

The moment users have to study the app,

the UX has already failed.

I hope Apple will once again

think hard about what “easy to use” actually means.

Starting, at least, with the Photos app.