tetramitus

To be fair, we haven't even had apps as we know them for a decade, and computers were built to game from the beginning.

Yeah, but, (no offense) the early touch screens were pretty unresponsive, especially in a POS situation where they were constantly getting beat up, grease smeared on them, etc.

I tend to agree that the UX with apps is generally frustrating. I feel like if they spent a day working on it they could come up with a better solution for it to be more intuitive. But I feel that to be intuitive you need to replicate what the user is already used to, or make it a very simple experience.

Another thing is that the teams behind apps are generally smaller than the teams behind video games. Apps generally start out as startups, and sometimes they hit and grow. If the app is successful, and you change the UX because you can afford a team to totally redesign it, you are going to have a lot of angery customers because they don't know how to use the already familiar app.

And the widget based touch screen is really the only way to go that I know of. I think there has been a lot of hesitation as people don't want to let go of the precision allowed by a mouse/stylus because that would limit their ability to fully customize, or whatever. I'm actually talking to someone about app dev right now for some video editing stuff on another forum and I am really pushing the "make cutting the video, and drag and drop really really simple", because if I'm editing video on my phone it's not going to win any oscars, I want to stitch a few clips together to show my mom, add music, that's it. I want video apps to do like 5 things, not 500. I understand wanting to include as much as you can in the app, but I would rather make it an expansion to have tons of different effects. I don't need hearts floating across the screen, or filters on the shots, I just want to cut the clip on the head and tail, drag and drop it in series with the other clips, be able to import music if I want, have a little audio control so I can adjust volume from video and volume from audio input and that's it.

With touch screens simplicity is what you need. I have fat fingers, don't make me try to activate some tiny little button by using the corner of my finger, where I miss the button 5 times and have to start over because there is another small button next to it. I just want "Add videos, add audio" then I can look at each clip independently and cut it, place it in a linear timeline, and have a video.

I don't like having to pick from lists on my phone because generally it means using the corner of my finger to pick a small option, I would prefer to operate quickly.

All of these complaints might just be from the apps I use the most, which are generally weather conditions (lots of information weather, not just "its sunny" but I want to know swell height,period, see radar, see satellite, so for these apps I don't really know how to make it super easy, as I want to be able to chose what information I am getting. But sometimes I want to just click the button and have the information I want presented to me.

I used to do some UX design when I was a kid, I would love to help design an interface for apps, but I don't have any formal training in it.