After what proved to be a weirdly long wait, Amazon’s Instant Video streaming service finally went global last week. Previously, it had only been available in a few countries (very few in Asia), but now you can watch it in Singapore, India, and 200 other countries worldwide – basically everywhere except China.
That’s great news for the citizens of the world, because Amazon has some really great content, including original shows like Transparent and The Man in the High Castle. Unfortunately, it means that the citizens of the world will now have to suffer through the disaster that is Amazon Instant Video’s user experience (UX).
Desktop doldrums
Since Netflix is the obvious comparison point (and one of Instant Video’s, ahem, prime competitors), let’s take a look at what Amazon offers for users accessing its service via a laptop or PC. Here’s what I personally see on Amazon (right), when compared to Netflix (left).
Netflix may start with a big ad for some new original show, but right there above the fold are the last five things I’ve watched, so I can pick up right where I left off. It’s super convenient; I just click on whichever show I feel like watching and it resumes immediately where I left it. I don’t have to remember which season it was; Netflix just remembers and starts in the appropriate place automatically. Total effort required to watch what I want? One click.
(And yeah, I watch Better Off Ted. It’s a funny show; don’t be put off by the terrible name).
Amazon’s UI is noticably worse. That top bar isn’t just my recent shows, it’s also random shows from my Watchlist. I’ve been watching The Man in the High Castle recently, and I can get to that one pretty quickly: mouse over the show image, wait for the popup, click the resume button. But my second-most-recent show is Mr. Robot, which for some reason only appears if I click over, past five or six shows from my Watchlist that I’ve never actually started. And The Sopranos, my third-most-recently-watched show, is even further away (two clicks, then mouseover, then click resume).
Amazon does give users the option to manually edit this bar, but to be frank, I’d rather it just be automated. Giving people quick access to the shows they’ve recently been watching just makes sense; I don’t want to have to constantly edit this bar as I finish old shows and start new ones to keep it convenient. Just give me direct links to the shows I’m actively watching; if I want to pick something new from my Watchlist, I’ll grab it from my Watchlist.
Speaking of the Watchlist, the way Amazon handles TV show seasons on it is very stupid. I’ve never understood why each season is listed separately in the first place, but the Watchlist page makes this even worse by not labeling the seasons in any way. Unless you’ve memorized the cover art for the season you want, you’re going to have to mouse over each season’s cover art in turn until you find the season you’re looking for.
This doesn’t matter much when it’s The Man in the High Castle and there are only two seasons, but there are six seasons of The Sopranos and they all have cover art that’s basically just a picture of Tony. They are listed in descending chronological order, but it’s a pain to have to count down to the season I’m looking for, and even more of a pain if I can’t remember which season I left off in, since there’s no indicator of that even in the mouse over popup.
What season of Six Feet Under is that? What seasons of the Sopranos are those? Unless you’ve memorized the cover art, you have to mouse over each season to check until you find the right one.
Crouching streaming service, hidden Android app
Amazon Instant Video’s mobile app is about the same as its website – I have the same experience with having to scroll past Watchlist shows to find the recently-watched shows I want to resume, and finding my Watchlist is kind of a pain (it’s weirdly only available in the usually-hidden sidebar menu). But the most annoying thing about Amazon’s video app is getting it in the first place.
How do you get the Netflix app? You hop on the App Store or the Play Store and download it. Easy-peasy, like every other app. And that’s how Amazon Instant Video works on iOS. But on Android, the Instant Video app isn’t on the Play store. Instead – as far as I can tell – you have to get the regular Amazon app, then try to watch a video with it, which will then prompt you to download the Video app. This is because Amazon wants you to use its own Android app store, but that doesn’t make it any less silly and unintuitive.
Minor gripes?
These all sound like minor nitpicks, and in the big picture they are. It’s not like having to click a few extra times or mouse-over some cover art to see what season it represents is particularly difficult or tiring. But at the same time, any behavioral economist (or UX designer) will tell you that the more steps you try to push people through, the fewer people are going to make it to the end. And I’ll admit, despite the fact that Amazon Instant Video’s content is arguably better (they’ve got all that great HBO stuff in my region), I watch Netflix far more often. In part, that’s because the user experience is simpler and more pleasant.
To be fair, Amazon also has some really cool features (like the integrated IMDB trivia and cast list popups that’ll tell you more about a specific scene as you’re watching it). But its user experience could be massively improved with just a few simple changes:
- Put recently-watched shows in the top bar on the “home” page of both desktop and mobile, in order of how recently they were watched. List unwatched Watchlist shows only after them.
- Group TV shows by show rather than listing each season separately. I understand the separate listing is probably set up to facilitate selling digital downloads or DVDs of these seasons individually, but for streaming it really doesn’t make sense to do it that way, and people don’t think about TV that way. You say, “I can’t wait to get home and watch The Walking Dead,” not “I can’t wait to get home and watch The Walking Dead Season Three.”
- If seasons must be listed separately, at least be sure that they’re clearly labeled, with text that doesn’t require a mouseover, so it’s easy for users to find a specific season at a glance.
- If seasons must be listed separately, add some kind of indicator on the Watchlist page so users can see at a glance which season they left off with. At present, it’s impossible to tell this from the Watchlist page, even with mouseover.
In other words: welcome to the world, Amazon Instant Video. Now up your UX game, or get run over by the Netflix machine.
(I’d also like to see Instant Video include lots more subtitle languages, regardless of the user’s region, but that’s not really a UX problem).
This is an opinion piece.
This post Amazon Instant Video’s UX is pretty bad appeared first on Tech in Asia.
from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/amazon-prime-videos-ux-bad
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