Minuteman Mobile

I am a student who uses the Minuteman app every week for school and fun, and the new version is a huge disappointment compared to the old one. The old app was fast, simple, and actually worked. This new version has several major issues that make it hard to use: • Extremely Slow: It takes forever to load the home screen. Sometimes it just hangs on a white screen and I have to force-quit it. • Login Issues: It constantly signs me out, which is frustrating when I’m trying to show my digital library card at the front desk. • Clunky Interface: Finding my holds and checking due dates used to take two taps; now it feels like I’m searching through a maze. The library is supposed to be about making resources easier to access, but this app makes it harder. Please consider bringing back the old interface or doing a massive update to fix the speed and reliability. Until then, I’ll just have to use the website, which is a shame.

As usual with municipal projects, this “improved” app is worse in almost every way. The old app was simple, straightforward, easy to use, and well laid out for a mobile app with big easy buttons and menu screens. This new abomination is like a bastard stepchild of a website and an app and not enjoyable to use. It’s slow and buggy, everything is tiny and hidden behind meaningless corporate buzzword tabs like “discover”. Do you need a degree to be this bad at menu design? Like from the same feeder school Netflix hires its designers? Why is the main screen pushing new titles at me? If I wanted to browse, I would WALK INTO THE LIBRARY. There’s a “hide” button, but it isn’t working for me. Remember when Butterfinger changed its recipe and no longer tasted the same but tried to advertise as better? That’s what you’re getting here: icky crumbly imitation Butterfinger; killed the simple app that works for an ugly one that doesn’t. It saddens me this change is being forced on patrons. Remember the old adage, folks: if it ain’t broke…

It takes so long to start up. What is it loading? The display is oddly cut off up at the top of the screen so that there’s a black bar and the words at the top are chopped off. The “NYT Bestsellers” list on the front page shows a bunch of generic books with “Unknown Title,” and if you click on one, the app goes to a blank screen and you have to restart it. The account button at the bottom brings up a weird side menu with caret characters (>) that usually signify topics that expand, but clicking them just opens the menu item in the main screen. Then there’s no clear indication how to get out of that screen, no back button or X to close it. You have to click a different thing at the bottom or, it turns out, you can swipe right to open the Account menu, which apparently you can do from anywhere in the app but there’s no indication of that. Anyway, I appreciate that they’re trying to provide an interface to the new catalog, but this app could have been built much better and needs a lot more debugging.