Changed refresh

Support
1

I feel like I am losing my mind but didn’t the refresh “button” used to be where the 'search" button is?

I never search but I do refresh.

2 Likes
2

I always use the drag down method.

4 Likes
3

Yes, but it’s been moved to the ‘overflow menu’ (the three dots) as we have pull-to-refresh and make space for other functionality.

4

If pull-to-refresh is supposed to be the interaction to replace the button (otherwise the button would not have been hidden) - then how am I supposed to use pull-to-refresh with a long queue?

My queue is often ~100 podcasts long. I will not scroll up all the way to the top just to refresh before I leave my wifi area.

Maybe I’m missing something but this looks like a worse UI compared to before.

1 Like
5

Yes, together with automatic refresh. However, you can still use the button in the overflow menu of the toolbar (3 dots) if pulling down does not work for you.

6

This is clearly worse than before.

Pull to refresh is practically unreachable for me because I’m listening mostly at the bottom of a long queue. And the dot menu thing is prone to user error. I see myself clearing the queue by mistake instead of refreshing, etc.

Also, there is more than enough space for the old button, next to the search function.

In general I’m willing to adapt to UI changes if they are well thought through. But in this case the only way to do it would be to change my basic usage pattern and massively shorten my queue (and be out of “reserves” when I travel etc.).

Thinking about downgrading now :frowning:

2 Likes
7

No worries, there is a warning message before the queue gets cleared

The point of the change was to make space for new buttons

1 Like
8

Thanks for the info on pull down to refresh. I get stuck in my ways but I appreciate the reply and advice.

1 Like
9

Three things I do (which may or may not be useful to you):

  • Shorten the automatic refresh period
  • Pull down if I want to refresh right now
  • If I’m looking for something specific that I know drops at a particular time I refresh just that one particular podcast. (Much faster than refreshing all of my subscriptions.)
10

Another way round this is to switch to the Subscriptions view and do a pull-down there then switch back.

2 Likes
11

I got very anxious when I updated to AP 3.3.2 and saw that the “refresh” button had disappeared :D. This would have been so much better if this major change was communicated in the change log.

12

The point of the change was to make space for new buttons

Seriously, I don’t get it. There is more than enough space for 3-5 Buttons. Now there is only one and the refresh still got removed.

1 Like
13

Thanks for that feedback. We didn’t consider this when preparing the notes. I’ll try to keep the feedback in mind for the future. Cc @femmdi.

Bear in mind that AntennaPod aims to have a simple interface, and that 5 buttons really doesn’t comply with that goal. Also, on one screen there may be only one button but some screens have more buttons. If you’re interested in reading the full discussion that lead to this decision, please have a look here: Improve toolbar by ueen · Pull Request #6836 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub

1 Like
15

I have another twenty years on you but it is a main career in IT rather than my age that dictates how tech savvy I am even though touch screens in my time were still a Tomorrow’s World pipe-dream.

2 Likes
16

I really like AntennaPod but this change is unnecessary and makes the app much more difficult to use.

If the number of buttons is an issue, why not at least make it configurable, like e.g. the options in the drawer? Then people who want to search frequently can put the search button there and you can put that as the default, but everyone who has longer lists who can’t just “pull down to refresh” easily when they want to could still have an easy to reach refresh button.

The current implementation with “refresh” only being accessible via the “overflow menu” where it’s also easy to hit the wrong option by accident and then to mess up the entire queue is really not user-friendly. Had I known about this change, I’d never updated the app and simply kept it on the release that works and is usable for as long as possible.

17

Much more difficult? Multiple alternatives to the pull to refresh method have been offered. The change may not be as conducive to your use case as you would like, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong or unnecessary, particularly when you and I don’t know what the long term road map for AP may include.

I’ve known about pull to refresh since switching from PC to AP but I do agree the change should have been communicated better for users who aren’t as familiar with AP.

2 Likes
18

I feel like I missed something here. We’re talking about the InBox, right? Pull down is no harder with a longer list. It just takes longer to check more feeds. It’s also not even necessary to push a button or pull down to refresh unless you need an immediate refresh. The automatic periodic refreshes keep the InBox current with no effort required.

19

I mainly use the “Queue” view to listen to podcasts, but the change is similar across all list views, as far as I can tell.

The arguments why this change has affected the usability of AntennaPod negatively for a number of users have already been made by others above, but I can give you again the observations from my own perspective.

Also, this change has been reported twice as a bug on GitHub by users who also couldn’t understand it. I’m usually not following the GitHub issues, but I’d be surprised if every change would result in bug reports and forum threads like this. So I’m clearly not the only one who is confused and unhappy about this new “feature”.

You might still ask why the options “pull down to refresh” and “periodic refresh” are no replacement for the simple button for me as a user?

Well, on a single screen in the “Queue” list view, I can see about 6 podcasts on my phone. Now, I usually have 50-100 podcasts in my queue. And I’m nearly always somewhere in the middle of my queue and rarely ever at the top (or bottom), where “pull to refresh” would work. So “pull to refresh” is simply not accessible to me 99% of the time I would need it, that’s not really a viable alternative.
(Beyond my particular usage pattern, anyone with more than say 20 podcasts in the queue probably will have a similar issue.)

The “periodic auto refresh” is useful, yes, but falls short too. I might agree that the periodic auto refresh could make manual refreshes unnecessary if it would offer more customisation. Currently, I can let it refresh every few hours - I don’t want to refresh every hour for example because I know that’s just creating pointless traffic and using energy/battery for no benefit. However, the “every 8 hours” for example doesn’t align with the times when I actually want them refreshed. If I could set 3-4 times per day to auto-refresh, instead of or in addition to an hourly interval, maybe I could fully automate it (e.g. for me this would be around 07:30 in the morning, maybe 12:30 in the afternoon and around 17:30 in the evening on most days).

Even better if, like for playback speed, there would be a setting to define refresh times (and intervals) for specific podcast feeds individually to refresh only what you need when necessary. Back to my personal use case, I know when some of the news podcasts I want to get fresh usually get released, so I could set it up once and wouldn’t have to worry about it again. And wouldn’t need a refresh button most of the time.

I’m wondering whether there has been any user research or user analytics to look into how often the “search” and “refresh” buttons have been tapped by the user base before this change? Are there any metrics available to guide such a UX decision?

Personally, I’ve used the “refresh” button 2-3 times a day, but never ever used the “search” button. What puzzles me in the reasoning that the “search” button appears more important than the “refresh” button is that if you have a “Queue” list long enough to make the “search” feature useful, if you’re not always only at the top of that list, “pull to refresh” wouldn’t be accessible. As a result, the UX for everyone with a list over e.g. 20 podcasts is slower now than before, because refreshing is more difficult now than it was.

20

(It looks like this was possible in the past but the feature has been removed due to Android restrictions:)

(Sorry for the missing links to 2 of the issues, the forum wouldn’t allow me to include all the references.)

1 Like
21

Fudge! This blew up.