2 ms·

No bitterness, but intense frustration when usability takes a hit. Based on experience, the bigger preview images and the gee whiz animation will be found to be

No bitterness, but intense frustration when usability takes a hit. Based on experience, the bigger preview images and the gee whiz animation will be found to be appreciated among test subjects and the redesign thus proclaimed a success. But the new difficulties in finding shows to watch, and to comment on and thus engage with, will result in fewer views as time goes by. Animated transitions, slow alpha fade ins for menus and popovers, and huge fonts are the latest design fad and is a must have for 2012 sites. If it makes actual usability worse, it doesn't matter. This evening I went there, saw a clip for The Office. This caused be to wonder if it had started or was about to start, so I went to the show page. No longer are there air dates shown. The clip I saw that was featured it wasn't clear if it was a preview from the next season or something from the past (I didn't remember seeing it). Went to find the episode list and found it doesn't exist anymore. Went to find discussion to see if others were talking about when the shows start and comments were empty. Couldn't accomplish anything I wanted to. I'm going to say that's a usability failure, at least compared to last year's design. There's a lot of room for improvement on Hulu so a redesign is not unwelcome. It's always been challenging to find what recently broadcast TV shows are available, one has to click on multiple next/prev tabs on multiple layers of sliding shows. But rather than add a list that shows a lot in a compact space, they removed the list from other areas and copied the difficult parts of their site onto the parts that were actually working. Not all the changes in the last few months are bad. The hover text on the play controls are nice, explaining that clicking the volume icon does mute, and that the round arrow means 10 second rewind. But overall the new design has many things that are a step backward.

jaredsohn 14y ago
>No longer are there air dates shown. If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list. >comments were empty. Hulu switched to Facebook comments awhile ago and didn't seem to import the old ones. I don't think anything changed with respect to that within the past week. I'm not sure that the reliance on images instead of text is all that bad. At least for episodes, you only need to scroll for the current season (there is a separate combobox for choosing which season to view) so unless a show is more frequent than weekly, you'll only need to scroll like four or five times and the episode numbers are prominently displayed. For clips and daily shows where Hulu maintains a large number of episodes, I can see the inconvenience, though. Edit: Yes, the delays can be annoying. Since everything is shown sequentially, I'm not sure that one would normally need to view a lot of the hover text but I imagine at times it could get annoying.
- droithomme 14y ago
  > If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list. OK, thanks, I do see it in the hover panel, which triggers after about 300ms and does a 200ms or so alpha fade in, so there's a half second latency per view, grrr, and then only 3 to 6 at a time visible depending on whether the window is expanded to 1920 pixels wide. I have a lot of pixels on my screen and full screen can only show 6 things at once, grrr. So in about 3 seconds I can see 3 air dates, then move mouse to side of window to click on slide show advance to see the next set, and then hover one pane at a time, wait a half second, then the next. Grrrr. The intentional sluggish design anti-pattern: grrrr. The massive space needed to show small amount of info design anti-pattern: grrrr. > Hulu switched to Facebook comments Arg, is that what happened. It's Facebook only then? We block all Facebook domains. Hulu had a system that was clunky but at least it was possible to work before. Grrrr. Facebook only login design anti-pattern: grrrr.
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Perhaps you're just so accustomed to the old interface, it's really hard for some people to adapt to a new UI. People said the same thing about the "old" facebook layout, but nobody remembers that layout anymore. I'm sure we'll hear gripes about this new UI for a few months and then nobody will remember what the old hulu looked like.
    - jamesgeck0 14y ago
      Facebook didn't boost the font size, make posts take up a larger amount of space in the feed, add sluggish animations, hide information behind popups that take a full second to appear, etc. (I didn't even know episode thumbnails had popups in the new design. Then I read jaredsohn's post and went to check. Then I thought it had a bug in Firefix because I couldn't get them to show up. Turns out I wasn't waiting long enough.) There are some definite usability issues with Hulu's update.

jaredsohn 14y ago

>No longer are there air dates shown. If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list. >comments were empty. Hulu switched to Facebook comments awhile ago and didn't seem to import the old ones. I don't think anything changed with respect to that within the past week. I'm not sure that the reliance on images instead of text is all that bad. At least for episodes, you only need to scroll for the current season (there is a separate combobox for choosing which season to view) so unless a show is more frequent than weekly, you'll only need to scroll like four or five times and the episode numbers are prominently displayed. For clips and daily shows where Hulu maintains a large number of episodes, I can see the inconvenience, though. Edit: Yes, the delays can be annoying. Since everything is shown sequentially, I'm not sure that one would normally need to view a lot of the hover text but I imagine at times it could get annoying.

droithomme 14y ago
> If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list. OK, thanks, I do see it in the hover panel, which triggers after about 300ms and does a 200ms or so alpha fade in, so there's a half second latency per view, grrr, and then only 3 to 6 at a time visible depending on whether the window is expanded to 1920 pixels wide. I have a lot of pixels on my screen and full screen can only show 6 things at once, grrr. So in about 3 seconds I can see 3 air dates, then move mouse to side of window to click on slide show advance to see the next set, and then hover one pane at a time, wait a half second, then the next. Grrrr. The intentional sluggish design anti-pattern: grrrr. The massive space needed to show small amount of info design anti-pattern: grrrr. > Hulu switched to Facebook comments Arg, is that what happened. It's Facebook only then? We block all Facebook domains. Hulu had a system that was clunky but at least it was possible to work before. Grrrr. Facebook only login design anti-pattern: grrrr.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Perhaps you're just so accustomed to the old interface, it's really hard for some people to adapt to a new UI. People said the same thing about the "old" facebook layout, but nobody remembers that layout anymore. I'm sure we'll hear gripes about this new UI for a few months and then nobody will remember what the old hulu looked like.
  - jamesgeck0 14y ago
    Facebook didn't boost the font size, make posts take up a larger amount of space in the feed, add sluggish animations, hide information behind popups that take a full second to appear, etc. (I didn't even know episode thumbnails had popups in the new design. Then I read jaredsohn's post and went to check. Then I thought it had a bug in Firefix because I couldn't get them to show up. Turns out I wasn't waiting long enough.) There are some definite usability issues with Hulu's update.