I haven’t written about UX all that much in the past, but over the last few weeks, I’ve come across enough hassles in my own daily activities that it seems like a reasonable topic to address in more detail. With the rise of high speed internet, numerous streaming services have emerged. Some of them have some amazing content that they’ve produced themselves. Others just distribute other peoples’ content. Unfortunately very few, if any, streaming services have everything that everyone wants, and so many people rely on multiple streaming packages. I use Netflix and have Amazon Video because of Prime, and because I recently cut out cable, I also have Hulu. And because I watch anime and gaming content, I use Twitch.tv and VRV.
Now I admit that overall I am likely paying more than I would for cable, but I have so many more options than I’d ever have with cable. The only real thing that I miss about having cable is a unified environment. It’s not too difficult for me, but for my mother, who is older and isn’t very good with technology, having to switch from app to app for different services is a problem, especially when it’s so different from using a guide system that cable uses.
The User Experience Problem
Just like with blockchain technologies, these relatively new services are suffering from horrible UX. There’s no unified portal. There’s nothing like a guide that allows someone to quickly find what they want. For each service, we need to learn an entirely new interface, even if we’re using all of these services on the same device like the Fire TV or Roku. The early days of the internet were the same, but at that time, there wasn’t really such a thing as great UX and really UX as a theory was a fairly new concept. In fact, it wasn’t until 1995 that anyone really thought of the concept as a well defined term.
Of course, there were people who worked on creating better designs, and there were people thinking about the theory to an extent, but it wasn’t defined in strict terms and there weren’t really groups of people dedicated to figuring out what made for a good user experience.
The Solution
Honestly, the solution is easy. Just separate the data from the interface. The internet has already moved in this direction. Obviously adopting standards takes time, and very often when someone tries to implement a new standard, all it does is add to the list of different options, but XML and other general purpose languages already allow for the easy distribution of information. By creating general categories of streaming services: movie, series, etc and having sufficient meta data, the device creators themselves can create a unified environment. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, VRV, et al. could then all be accessed from a single guide environment that can be designed to be user friendly. DRM isn’t really an issue either because there are standards for DRM in streaming.
This solution is the only one that will allow for much wider adoption of various streaming services. People don’t want to learn a new interface with every new service, nor do they want to have to switch between multiple interfaces just to watch movies on one service or a series through another. It’s absurd and there’s no reason for it.
Conclusion
At this stage in technological development and information distribution, we should not be limited by individually produced interfaces. Services should be providing the data, and it should be on the interface to aggregate the data and control what we want to stream. The web has been moving this direction for some time, though progression has been far slower than it should be. However, given the large selection of content offered by traditional cable providers, along with their single interface for accessing all that content, the only way for streaming services to compete is through working together to create a singular user experience across platforms.
