Posts tagged problems
Netflix’s New Tablet UI Does Not Solve Its Search Problems
Nov 15th
Netflix today announced a new user interface for all Android tablets, including both the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook. The interface displays twice as many movies to place in the user queue and is generally a better looking app than it was before. Yet, does the new UI solve some of Netflix’s problems with search and discovery on tablet devices?
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One of the biggest problems with Netflix on tablets (the new UI will be coming to the iPad soon) and third-party devices like the Roku is that the search function is not as intuitive as it is on PCs and laptops. For instance, we were watching The Change Up with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds the other night on the Roku. We then wanted to find more Bateman movies or shows but the search function for the Roku (and Android tablets and the iPad) does not allow users to search by actors, directors or studios. As of this point, only the way to find those movies is to search through the browser.
Hulu Plus is the same way. The only search results that come up are TV show and movie titles. Ultimately, this may be the biggest problem with discovery on either premium streaming content service. Netflix can add as many bells and whistles to the Android tablet UI as it likes, but ultimately it is just a beefier version of the same thing.
How can Netflix solve this problem? One of the best avenues may be a partnership or acquisition. Does Netflix have the liquid capital to make an outright acquisition of the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb)? That would solve many of Netflix’s discovery problems in a snap. Currently, what a lot of users do is check IMDb independent of Netflix and then go and search for those particular titles. The great thing about IMDb is that it breaks down content by actor, studio, director etc. It is precisely the type of search that Netflix should have on tablets and third-party streaming devices.
Netflix may have had an opportunity earlier this year with the movie app and critic base Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes. Warner Bros. snapped up Flixster as part of its content collection, discovery and social network and hence turned it into an exceptionally horrid desktop app (see our review here). With Netflix’s often tenuous relationship with the major movie studios, Flixster has been closed off to them forever.
The bottom line: It is nice to see a new tablet UI for Netflix, but it does not solve the real problems that users have on devices. What kind of feature do you want to see from Netflix on tablets? Let us know in the comments.
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5 Problems with Gmail’s New Design
Nov 11th
Gmail’s redesign may come with a bunch of spiffy new themes that look great in screenshots, but the actual usability of Gmail is in steep decline. For business users, Gmail is going downhill fast. It looks like Gmail is trying too hard to be a “social” application, and not hard enough to be an application for reading and responding to email quickly and effectively.
I’ve been using Gmail now almost since its release to the public. Its clean interface, keyboard shortcuts and relatively responsive Web interface have made Gmail my go-to mail client for years. While I’ve had some gripes with Gmail for years (not being able to sort by subject or sender in my inbox, for instance) the latest redesign has me considering going back to Thunderbird. Considering Thunderbird has improved very little in the last five years, that’s a sad reflection on the state of Gmail.
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Cleaner, More Modern
Google’s “cleaner, more modern” look is neither of those things. First of all, Google? Piet Mondrian called and has two things to say: He’d like his designs back, and he’s thrilled to be alive again. (OK, maybe not.) If you happen to be an art buff or took a few art history classes in college, you might realize that the “new” Gmail/Google interface seems to be taking a strong cue from Mondrian’s paintings and the De Stijl movement.
OK, technically I guess you could call this “modern” if you’re referring to “modern art.” But modern art and modern are two very different things these days.
The boxy designs with thin black lines and assorted white, yellow, blue, and red boxes may work for you as art (or it may not). It’s certainly not working for me as a way to view my inbox, though. To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Mondrian or the De Stijl movement. I can’t say for sure whether Google’s UI team is full of closet Mondrian fanatics, but there’s a strong resemblance.
Wherever the UI team got its cue, the interface may look nice – but it isn’t actually that useful.
Generally Confusing
Some of the gripes I (and others) have with the new interface may well fall under the “people don’t like change” category. But a number of the changes just seem like clear steps backwards. Part of the problem with the new layout/interface is that it’s difficult to tell where the interface ends and the email itself begins.
There’s no divider between the mail contents and the navigation on either side. Too much white space in many areas. If you use a Gmail edition that’s unpaid (read: has ads) the problem is even worse due to the visual clutter of the ads on the right-hand side.
A lot of the UI elements have been minimized or iconified, making them harder to see and less intuitive. The button to toggle mails as importan/unimportant has been moved from the toolbar to the top of the mail, next to the tags. The calendar and quicklinks have been shuffled off to a separate “tab” at the bottom that swaps with the chat list.
Icons Only
A major problem that I have with the new interface is that Gmail has gone from text-based buttons to an icon-only design. Lots of desktop applications offer the choice between text, icons or text and icons. Gmail, however, seems to have decided that we’re all better off with just icons. But we’re not.
Not only does this make the interface less usable, but it also takes up more vertical space than the original design. The icons really don’t do the job anyway. Does an octagon with an exclamation point really say “spam” to you? Some folks may prefer icons to text, but Gmail doesn’t seem to provide an option to switch between the two. (Even the Gmail folks rely on text for the “More” button, which should be an indication that concepts are better conveyed with text than icons alone.)
Information Density
The good with the redesign is that Gmail has an option to choose between “compact” and “comfortable” views. There’s also a “cozy” which seems to be exactly the same as “comfortable” on my display.
The bad is that the compact is hard to read, and comfortable displays less information than the classic Gmail design.
As mentioned already, the whitespace issue is a problem. There’s also the sudden intrusion of user icons in my mail interface. Some folks may find this enticing, somehow, but I find a slew of user icons on the left-hand side of my mail to be distracting. It takes up unnecessary space, and it’s duplicating the contact information displayed on the right-hand side of Gmail.
I brought up the GMail topic on Google+ this morning and one of the folks who commented said the redesign seems to be for tablets and “makes the buttons easy to stab with a fat finger.” As an owner of fat fingers, I can appreciate this – in a tablet design. For a desktop design, not so much. I still use my mouse and not my fingers for most of my Gmail work.
More Work
Reasonable people can disagree on what makes for an improvement in a user interface, but adding more steps to typical user actions is rarely seen as an improvement.
But that’s exactly what the new theme for Gmail does. In the standard design, you have a list for Mail, Contacts and Tasks. In the new design, you have a Mail “menu” in the same place with a drop-down. This poses two problems. First, it’s non-obvious that it’s a menu. It looks like it’s just text sitting there. Secondly, it requires an additional click to get to contacts. Yes, that’s just one extra click, but that’s a lot of clicks over a long period.
Google has also removed the bottom toolbar from the interface. So if you’re at the bottom of your inbox, you have to move the mouse back up to the top of the screen to archive, spam, mark messages read, and so forth.
All these little tweaks add up to more work on the user’s part.
It’s Not All Bad
This isn’t to say that Google hasn’t gotten anything right. I do like the new conversation view. I like the idea of the “comfortable,” “cozy” and “compact” views users can toggle easily. Not crazy about the actual styles that exist now, but the ability to toggle between them is a good idea. The fact that you can resize the widgets on the left-hand side is nice as well.
The new HD themes are much more attractive, but I’m not sure they’re actually any more usable than the prior set of themes. The term “visual clutter” pops into mind. The themes suggest to me that the Gmail team are really thinking more about users who send a handful of emails a day, and not the business users that live in the inbox. But props to Gmail on the actual designs.
The “Mail from this month” information you get under “more information” on the right-hand side for a contact is useful.
But, overall, I think the new design is a step back. I’d like to see Gmail provide a theme for users who are processing large quantities of email, without the distractions. Until then, I think I’m going to be looking into standard desktop mailers again to try to find something more efficient. Any suggestions, or do you think that the Gmail redesign is the best ever?
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems by @audette
Oct 10th
Pagination has always been a sticky problem for search engines. While not nearly as complex as faceted navigations for SEO, they can certainly cause crawling inefficiencies and excessive duplicate content. They can also create problems with undesirable pages ranking for important terms, in cases…
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems – Search Engine Land
Oct 10th
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Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems
Search Engine Land While not nearly as complex as faceted navigations for SEO, they can certainly cause crawling inefficiencies and excessive duplicate content. They can also create problems with undesirable pages ranking for important terms, in cases where the search … 10 Steps to a Successful SEO Migration Strategy |
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Yet More Tips For Diagnosing & Fixing Panda Problems
Sep 12th
Here we are, five months after Panda and the only publicly confirmed Panda recovery stories are those that followed the Panda 2.3 update. This is notable because this particular update was one in which Google took actions to help restore some sites that were unfairly hit by the earlier versions of…
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The Imagine Cup: Student-Built Technology Tackles the World’s Most Pressing Problems
Jul 12th
This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. It’s down to the final round today with those making it to the very last round of the finals presenting the projects they’ve designed and built.
These projects do not simply highlight new technologies or innovative applications. As part of the Imagine Cup mandate, the students’ projects must tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues, as outlined by the United Nations’ Millennium Goals. These include combating disease, ending hunger, and reducing childhood mortality to name a few.
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I’ve spent the day watching the finalists’ presentations, and I’m impressed by their ideas and implementations – not to mention their ability to pitch and answer judges’ questions in what for many of them is a foreign language. The awards will be given out tomorrow evening, but here are some of my favorites from the day.
Team Dragon (U.S.)
Asthma is the most common chronic illness in children. While an asthma attack is a terribly traumatic experience for kids, routine asthma care — performing regular breathing tests — can feel like a chore. Not surprisingly, kids’ adherence rates to their asthma management routines are very low.
Enter Azmo the Dragon, a mobile role-playing game that makes these daily breathing tests fun. The game connects the mobile phone to a spirometer (the device that asthma sufferers breathe into to record their lung performance). Using the spirometer, kids control Azmo, a fire-breathing dragon. From having breathing be a source of trauma and disempowerment, Azmo the Dragon lets kids destroy villages and castles with their fiery breath.
The game itself is fun – there are several levels, and the dragon has other abilities besides simply breathing fire. All this makes daily test-taking seem like much less of a burden. But that’s just part of the genius of this game. Azmo the Dragon takes a baseline of user’s lung function, takes track of a patient’s daily data, and as such will make it easier to tell when an asthma attack may be impending (typically asthma sufferers experience several days of declining lung function beforehand). Through regular monitoring then, there’s a better chance for intervention.
The students who built the game attend Rice University, and at the Imagine Cup are showcasing not only their incredible game but also the spirometer hardware (developed at Rice) that is far cheaper than other apparatuses on the market. Typically these cost around $500, but the one used with Azmo the Dragon costs between $50 and $100 and is open source.
Team Note-Taker (U.S.)
Arizona State University student David Hayden is legally blind, and when he enrolled in math classes, found it incredibly difficult to keep up with note-taking in the classes, so much so that he had to drop the courses. So he set out to devise a tool to help visually-impaired students with note-taking as none of the products or services currently on the market, including legally mandated support personnel, really suffice. Hayden is one of the members of Team Note-Taker, the winner of the U.S. Imagine Cup finals.
Team Note-Taker has built a custom-designed pan/zoom camera and tablet PC that supports both pen and multi-touch input. This allows for the capture of video and audio, all connected to a student’s handwritten notes. The tool has a number of great features, including the ability to enhance the image (when an instructor’s dry-erase marker is about to run out, for example), to swipe the video back a few frames (so a student can see the whiteboard and continue taking notes, even if the instructor has stepped in front and blocked the view), to take screenshots of the whiteboard, and to search all of this offline. All the notes can be archived by class.
Studies have shown that students learn best when they take their own notes, and Note-Taker helps give visually impaired students the ability to do just that, easily moving between the distance-reading of the whiteboard at the front of the class and the close-reading of handwritten notes.
OneBuzz (New Zealand)
OneBuzz is tackling the problem of malaria, the single largest killer of children in the world. The disease is preventable and curable, and although over a billion dollars are spent on this, it’s not clearly not enough, partly because of inefficiencies in the system. “The mosquito is winning,” said the team in their presentation today, saying they’re going to give “one giant ‘byte’ back for mankind.”
OneBuzz’s tool aggregates data from a variety of sources to help manage the supply chain for malaria medicine, not so that clinics can react to outbreaks but so they can respond in real-time and even better, actually predict them. This will ensure that the clinics have the medicine, people have the nets, and areas have the pesticides that they need.
The data comes from text-messaging from both individuals and clinics who can report patients, deaths, and medicine stockpiles. It also uses sensory and satellite data in order to track rainfall and the weather conditions that might lead to an outbreak. As malaria is seasonal and cyclical, the system utilizes data from past years and past weeks in order to ascertain which clinics and which communities will need help.
OneBuzz says it hopes to unite researchers and aid organizations. The team has made a strategic alliance with India’s Institute of Malaria Research, but it has also created a simple, open API so that others can build upon and extend the system.
Disclosure: Microsoft paid for my travel to the Imagine Cup.
Image credits: Team Dragon, Tom on Tech, Imagine Cup’s Flickr page
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Hot At Sphinn: Search Conference Tips, Duplicate Content Problems & More
Jun 13th
With the fifth edition of SMX Advanced happening last week, discussion on our sister site Sphinn focused on how to optimize your search conference experience. Our “Discussion of the Week” asked people to share their Best Tips For Search Conference Attendees and whether you’re a…
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Key Problems With Current Social Link Graph Signals
Jun 7th
With the roll out of Google +1 Buttons For Websites, almost all the key players in the on-page social button space are ready for the fight to truly be joined. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and old stallwarts Sharethis and Add-This all provide content creators with the ability to embed shareability,…
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