It truly baffles me how one could devise an interface so bad as the PrimeVideo UI. I have yet to discover the algorithm behind the near random search results trows up, and autocomplete for 90% of the cases trows up something 'that is not available in your region'. It's 2020. How hard can it be to serve a small catalogue of available titles and allow some decent parameterized querying?
I also always wonder how companies can simultaneously offer to sell their highly advanced AI-bla search, yet utterly fail at searching themselves.
I still remember the time when Google tried to license their search servers to enterprises. It appears that market has now been completely eaten by Algolia. And my hunch is that it's because Google's search results are completely irrelevant for professional users. I search for a Windows API function name, and I get pages of SEO spam trying to sell me an unrelated Udemy beginner's course.
It's truly amazing. You need to type way too much of the title, and even then you may not get that, you may get seasons 1-45, which are inexplicably different items on the result, of something you didn't search for at all.
Of the 3 services I subscribe to, only Amazon gets things so wrong so often.
Funny story, just yesterday some friends and I were trying to watch "You're Next" as it is free with Prime. We found the properly spelled entry but it only offered to add it to a watchlist. There was another entry, titled "You're Next'" (note the trailing single quote) that was the actual movie and available to watch. My only guess is some peculiar manual data-entry mistake but that doesn't really explain the correctly titled entry...
Do you know of any articles on what is wrong with Prime UI? I am writing up a proposal to fix a similar service that also has really bad UI - I would like to see if there are intersections between them.
No article I know of, but I'm happy to start a chain of complaints here:
- When you search for a title, even if that title is in their library, odds are the exact match won't be the first result
- The differentiation between what is rentable, purchasable and freely streamable (with gradations based on different subscriptions) is incomprehensible from the listings pages.
The following is just for desktop browsers, since I haven't tried their app:
- they split their shows by season to make their catalogue look bigger, but it's more confusing for the user
- don't make it explicit on the thumbnail either, so you have to hover over it to know what season of the show we're talking about
- although they do a decent job at continuing to watch episodes in a season, they're not making it clear when you've already watched entire seasons and those remain on the screen and are recommended to you over and over again
- advertise a trailer as an entire new season (see: The Boys season 2), leading to pretty gigantic disappointment (vs the netflix experience where a red notification for something you like is actually a great surprise because you KNOW it's an actual release)
- have a lower chance of being able to reload a page of something you left mid-watch and the page successfully reloading to the right content and timestamp
- the overflow of their preview hides the show underneath the current one which means any directly vertical scrolling is infuriating because you will trigger the overflow of the show underneath (that you see 20% of) only after having gone vertically down beyond 80% of the div in question
- the line = product line thing is confusing, as everything starts with "prime" for a full screen, (so why the repetition? oh, it's because ->) suddenly you get news (I don't care about them) and movies to rent or buy (I also don't care about paying prime to pay on top of it)
Don't forget that UHD versions are separate from their SD/HD versions and sometimes OV versions are separate from subbed versions that are sperate from dubbed versions. So you end up with ~6 search results for the same movie. Beware of what you buy.
Indeed. It’s also better than another UI which requires an esoteric feature of a remote control that I don’t even use and offers no way of switching that stupid choice off, preventing me from ever getting more information about the shows it is presenting beyond the title and banner.
It’s also better than one that always says I’m logged out when I start it, and then magically logs me in a minute or two later... while I’m in the process of trying to log in. (Or any of the several other ones that require me to log in nearly every time.)
Of course calling any of these a “User Interface” is almost laughable. SLOM is a better term. That’s “Small Library Obfuscatory Method” for the uninitiated. Or maybe they’re just trying to save bandwidth by making viewers spend viewing time searching pointlessly through their offerings that are ordered seemingly according to the pattern of pigeon droppings outside their office.
No, I didn't. Last I looked you couldn't at all. Apparently I can now, but not via my Roku. I have to figure out how to get to Netflix from a PC apparently.
Also note that you're usually limited to a certain video quality when watching on a PC. Unless thing have changed since I last checked, you can't go past 1080p on a computer; you have to be on a streaming device (Roku, AppleTV, etc.) This is why I usually watch streaming services through my Playstation even though I have the PC hooked up to my big TV.
Yeah, it's quite bad UX. The subtitles can also only be configured via the website, which is something not many people seem to know. On my TV the default subtitle settings result in blooming so I configured them to be yellow with a black border and transparent background.
I almost don't think any service will ever get a decent ui. It seems to be against the business model to be able to search easily and keep lists of what you have watched and what you want to watch.
But TBH I would just like to watch one video on prime without it being stretched out of shape. It is probably some weird edge case with my particular STB, but every other streaming service seems to manage it properly.
I am always astonished at how bad the UI of Amazon products are. I know that there is some dark pattern used on purpose, but even the "normal UI" is a disaster. It lacks clarity, it doesn't convey the information needed, it is often confusing ... How can the e-shopping leader can have a worse UI that a small business ? It keep boggling my mind.
I am seeing a new UI for the past few weeks, where the FF is 10s at a time, with frames displayed over the progress bar: much like Netflix. The newer experience is much better.
The UI on prime was so much better than the Hulu UI from about 2018-june 2020.
Someone clearly wanted to do something "different and more beautiful than Netflix". The result was basically scrolling through shows one at a time. search was bad. Horrible.
My wife and I tried to re-watch some episodes of Brooklyn 99, and every time we would watch them they would start 20s from the end of the show. Like they stored that we had last watched ending at the end (-0s) and now when coming back months or years later, we might want to resume watching the last 0s with a buffer before (a bad resume behavior).
It seems they finally dropped that UI I'm the last few months to something sane, maybe the same as before I don't remember.
You'd think that after 15 years or so of streaming video (probably more) they'd get making a UI for it right.
What I'm instead seeing is an attempt at copying Netflix' interface. This is actually far too common - competing services that just copy their competitor's homework when it comes to UI.
I mean it makes sense in a way if you're targeting that service's current members, they're familiar enough with the UI etc.
