4 ms·
I often test our product by recording a speedrun video of the main functionality, not to be shared, but to reveal all the learned helplessness and clunky user e
by Jugurtha 5y ago
I often test our product by recording a speedrun video of the main functionality, not to be shared, but to reveal all the learned helplessness and clunky user experience.
It is amazing how recording a video going through the product does: the video is full of swear words and cursing. All the things that were invisible suddenly become glaring. All the un-necessary clicking and convoluted flows become torture with cognitive dissonance: "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and it hits you. Hard.
Hence, some things trigger that agression, especially in a more mature product. For example, I only used YouTube as a consumer of videos, but recently I was putting a lot of videos there in my personal account.
I then created another account and wanted to transfer the videos. Easy, right? No. I looked and looked, and read documentation, and searched on the web, and people said you need to download the videos from one account, then upload them back again to the second account. That can't be, right? I mean I clearly am not the first one to want to do that, and YouTube has existed for ages. There has to be a way I'm stupid enough to have overlooked. I contact them on Twitter, and they link to the documentation that tells you to download videos somewhere, then upload them back again. This is insanity. They're already on YouTube's infra, why do the round trip. Just move the darn thing? I'm not privy to how their infrastructure works, but I have a feeling that this is not the flow I want.
One other example... I have one Android phone that was not physically in the same place as me. I wanted to get the call history (which is backed up in Drive) to urgently call the last number that called me. I could clearly see that the call history was backed up in Drive, and it shows you a "Preview" button that, when you click on, shows a modal that tells you the call history is backed up, and has a button that says "Delete".
I can use Find my Phone and pin-point the location, I can erase it, I can make it ring, I can download all my data and Drive. I can download the device settings. I can Delete a backup, but not download it.
Now I need to wait for tomorrow to be able to get that phone for that call log.
Here's what is interesting: it's almost impossible that I be the first one that hits something like this (either for YouTube or Drive) for products with this many users existing for this long. Moving a video around is practically so obvious, you don't think there would be a documentation for it, let alone a documentation that tells you you can't do it. Heck I'll run my mouth and say it's harder to write and maintain the docs that tell you you can't do it, than add that no-brainer functionality... But then again, I'm running my mouth.
- adamvalve 5y agoThe YouTube issue you describe could be on purpose to limit abuse/gaming of the system. Since we don’t deal in YouTube’s moderation day to day we aren’t privy to the reasoning that feature was never developed. Maybe they did it early on and realized before they released it could be abused to make copies of your YouTube channel with slightly different language optimized for different search terms. Hard to say intent without working on it day to day. Sometimes things are hard on purpose because a small part of the population suck and will abuse a feature.
- Jugurtha 5y agoYes, that was my point. I know that the current flow is not what I want, but I understand there obviously are reasons I'm not privy to, but then again it looks obvious to me from the outside.... but then again I'm not aware of all the reasons they've done it like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence The fact there exist reasons something sucks does not make it suck less for the user, even taking into account the user's awareness of these reasons' existence. It's the "Of course, but maybe...": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGzFQg_1xc
- davidgerard 5y agothis doesn't make it suck any less for the user
- jsnell 5y agoWhat's the really common use case for changing the ownership of individual videos? It seems super niche, and seems like a feature with a lot of really sharp edges that will be hard to get right. While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account?
- Jugurtha 5y ago>What's the really common use case for changing the ownership of individual videos? It seems super niche, and seems like a feature with a lot of really sharp edges that will be hard to get right. What's the really common use case for changing the location of a file from one directory to the other? >While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account? This blows. Is the word here "just"? Did you read how when I record videos and I say "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and then it hits me that I'm using "simply" and "just" incorrectly because the steps are not easy. The above is YouTube specific and requires to know channels and brand accounts. We're talking about moving something from A to B in the same context: like a file from one directory to the other on your interface, you should be able to move a video from one account to the other.