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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 tr

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?

fxtentacle 6y ago
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.
- 1DRACOSEA8 6y ago
  You sound like an idiot. I’m sure you were not intending to Communicate so naively a point, if that, lazily delegated to the tongue not the cortex at hand; an expression without closure. No company is looking to serve you, for one, you hang out at HN. Hackers are terrible customers. You can toil away in darkness for all I care, little paper work, little trail. Some of the best projects were done with secrecy in mind, resulted in seemingly failure, but they ended being successful by not listening to the naysayers: MONODEVELOP, KUBERNETES, ETC
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
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.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  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.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    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)
  - foepys 6y ago
    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.
thewhitetulip 6y ago
Searching for Inception goves me results like Deadpool, Mom and a host of irrelevant shows!
oblio 6y ago
That's not bad UI, it's malicious UI. They're doing that because in many regions their streaming selection is pitiful. I guess the US is better?
- brianbreslin 6y ago
  No the US has a mediocre selection on Prime.
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
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.
- SCNP 6y ago
  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...

fxtentacle 6y ago

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.

1DRACOSEA8 6y ago
You sound like an idiot. I’m sure you were not intending to Communicate so naively a point, if that, lazily delegated to the tongue not the cortex at hand; an expression without closure. No company is looking to serve you, for one, you hang out at HN. Hackers are terrible customers. You can toil away in darkness for all I care, little paper work, little trail. Some of the best projects were done with secrecy in mind, resulted in seemingly failure, but they ended being successful by not listening to the naysayers: MONODEVELOP, KUBERNETES, ETC

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

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.

InitialLastName 6y ago
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.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  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)
- foepys 6y ago
  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.

thewhitetulip 6y ago

Searching for Inception goves me results like Deadpool, Mom and a host of irrelevant shows!

oblio 6y ago

That's not bad UI, it's malicious UI. They're doing that because in many regions their streaming selection is pitiful. I guess the US is better?

brianbreslin 6y ago
No the US has a mediocre selection on Prime.

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago

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.

SCNP 6y ago
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...