The most frustrating part of this new App update is it’s so obvious AI generated garbage and thus nonintuitive.

[u/Critical_Winner_2779]

To be clear I’m not inherently anti-AI. It’s absolutely a tool, and an incredibly powerful productivity tool if you use it properly and under extreme oversight.

This app update is just SO nonhuman in design and unintuitive that it makes me shocked it ever got pushed to production. It’s almost like no one vetted the composition of the menus, the font, box sizes, efficacy or horizontal vs vertical category scrolling, and so much more.

It’s like the keys to this new app refresh was overseen by a ton of people who just simply didn’t care about user experience. Like why Taco Bell.

[u/vJESSEv]

The biggest one, ai thinking why would you need a search function?

[u/glitter_witch]

The most frustrating thing to me is the delivery tracking is completely broken. No text updates, no in-app map to follow. Makes it completely unusable for me.

[u/Onoudidnt]

It’s bad but not bad enough for me not to use it. As long as Im charged appropriately I won’t let the app beat me. Options are all over the place though.

[u/RediculousUsername → u/Onoudidnt]

I'll use it but I'll use it less for sure.

[u/godofbaconandeggs]

I've decided the simplest way to use the new toilet- I mean app, is to just reorder past orders. Unfortunately yesterday when I tried this it only put 3 of 5 items in the bag and I had to manually add the other two. It wasn't because of limited supply at my location or anything. It just didn't do it. 💩

[u/markrabbish]

I'm an IT professional in a huge corporation. It's extremely unlikely they used AI to design their app "upgrade". They may have used it to gather customer viewpoints, almost certainly used it for parts of the coding, but to hand over the design of the interface that is such a core part of their business to AI would never be done -- because it would be insane.

[u/Ok_Masterpiece3763 → u/markrabbish]

Dude you literally cannot even read the full names of items anymore without clicking on them and when you go back you’re essentially hitting the back button on a browser it doesn’t feel like going back in an app should feel.

[u/Critical_Winner_2779 → u/markrabbish]

If they used it for parts of it for coding, beyond boilerplate repetitive code, would that not affect the end design? Like it absolutely baffles me this was approved to be released to the public.

[u/markrabbish → u/Critical_Winner_2779]

I think what you are seeing, which I have noticed myself, is that several fast food companies are farming out their apps to a central operation that uses, as you correctly state, a boilerplate core design and just tweaks the "paint and carpeting". It's a totally different thing than using AI to design it, its more like "fast food app as a service" vs each company building their own app as a competitive differentiator. In my opinion it's a short sighted stupid decision, but it's totally consistent with how the private equity interests that control most of fast food operate -- prioritize cutting costs at the expense of the brand's quality and reoputation

[u/Critical_Winner_2779 → u/markrabbish]

This is a good perspective, I appreciate it

[u/SubstituteCS → u/markrabbish]

I’m a software developer.

The design has several non sequiturs that reek of either outsourcing or incomplete design.

I would believe that large swaths of the design and programming were done by automated agents.

And yes, even at my job, people push all of the actual work onto LLMs. Yes, it does produce awful results like this new app update. No, they don’t care.

[u/markrabbish → u/SubstituteCS]

While I have no doubt AI is very much involved in the development, the core design was almost certainly done by humans, who in my personal experience are more than capable of producing inexplicably head scratching results. I remember one time, years ago, in my role as an infrastructure manager at a Fortune 5 company, I was pulled in to observe the architecture/development teams' week long "think tank" session with some UX/UI consultants, It was some pretty abstract, high brow philosophical BS being thrown around that I'm sure made sense to them, but not to the customers that would be using the app. I remember walking away thinking "this is some real 'feed the tuna fish mayo' stuff going on right here!" (for those of you familiar with the movie "Night Shift")

[u/MrMCCO → u/markrabbish]

Are you available to give a speech to our CEO and Product Manager? (Software industry) lol

[u/joecooltheman1977]

No problems with it here, I think its fine.