MPR News

Latest redesign is a fail; terrible user experience. Why oh why do they make weather so hard to find (it’s now under ‘listen’ for some unknown reason, like users don’t read weather?). Scrolling through stories is irritating and clunky, selecting stories functionality is too sensitive so I’m constantly opening stories I didn’t intend to select. It used to be a tolerable experience but they recently made it a lot worse with the redesign…spending a lot less time on the app as a result. 😝

What can I say that hasn’t already been said.? This app is just terrible. There are three primary problems: when you move between Wi-Fi and cellular service, the app always plays an ad, as if you are joining the service for the first time. This is ridiculous, especially when you are working in the garden or the garage at the edge of your Wi-Fi and you’re going constantly back-and-forth. You have to turn off Wi-Fi, then later you will have to remember to turn it back on. The second problem is that the artist/song title is constantly freezing up displaying hours old data, until you restart the app. Finally, the service frequently just stops working, for no apparent reason, regardless of proximity to a signal. You have to restart the app to get it to stream.

The new format does not allow you to advance to the next story without first returning to the “main” screen, requires too much scrolling, and opens stories when you’re just trying to scroll (like if you tap just wrong you open a story instead of advancing the scroll...So. Frustrating.). Also, the left/right arrows at the bottom of every story don’t usually go left or right (back/forth?) - why are they even there? Maybe make them appear only if they lead somewhere. Bottom line, I think the app’s previous format was WAY better and easier to navigate.