Ask HN: Why is Disney+ UX so bad?
- subtitle settings get reset every time I close the website.
- the button for changing subtitles is in the upper right corner. Once you open the menu the button for closing it appears in the upper left corner. You can't close the menu by clicking outside of it, despite the fact that you can still see the blurred video in the background.
- pressing space doesn't pause the video, but repeats the last action you did. If you closed the subtitle menu by pressing esc, pressing space will open it again. If you entered the full screen mode, pressing space will close it.
- there is no way (afaik) to open a list of all episodes from within the player. You have to go back to the show's main page, choose the season (because it always defaults to season 1) and scroll a horizontal list (which always defaults to the first episode) using a button that appears only once you hover it. Scrolling with a mouse scroll/touchpad doesn't work.
- it is impossible to search for movies using a director's name. For example, I know that Disney+ has a lot of Charlie Kaufman's and Wes Anderson's movies available - they are my favorite directors - but I couldn't quickly check which specific movies there are.
I know that it's possible that I have higher standards of UX because I'm a programmer, but I doubt that Disney+'s interface is intuitive to anyone.
98 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadCounter argument: you need time to develop a product and not all features will get the same priority, but things might get there over time. The alternative would be to delay releasing it until it is "perfect".
Do you watch only on Web? Or have you also tried their TV app?
This is the biggest one right here. The platforms that have the most viewers will receive the most attention from the UX team because the risk of a poor experience driving people away is much higher. I'm willing to bet that the average Disney+ subscriber is probably watching shows on their TV and using different methods of input such as a controller or TV remote instead of using a keyboard.
Disney has _passionate_ engineers, not necessarily good. Disney also has the mantra of "we will tell you if your idea is good," rather than empowering their software team to make positive changes. Finally, they pay far less than the industry average, so if you believe in a correlation between good pay and good people, you can see where they come up short.
It seems Disney relies on passionate people will do what is right for the customer in all aspects of their business. That's fine for working in the theme parks, but when you miss out on talented engineers, the folks that work there are passionate but get either blocked by lack of knowledge on how to make a desired change (they don't hire the best), or lack of management support to make the change (we will tell you if your idea is good).
All in all, in sums up to mantra "Disney is bad at tech."
Other data points - their website is horrid. I figured out once that only 23% of the page showed me information I wanted (reservation availability, park hours, etc...) and the other 77% was branding, whitespace or terrible nav UI.
D23 attendees had to install 2 apps, log into 1 and then were able to buy merchandise in the 2nd app.
And so on...
And their TV app is also buggy. I have 2 shows that I have watched all episodes that won't clear from the "currently watching" list. There is no way to 'give up' on a series and remove it from the currently watching list either. It also logs me out if I walk away for a few minutes to grab some food or whatnot.
Firstly, you need a company who actually cares about what its users want. Otherwise all the product and UX people's skill gets directed into things like "optimising engagement" which tends not to result in a good experience for the user.
It really, truly just boils down to that. You're not going to switch to Netflix. Or Hulu. Or Apple. Or buy BluRays. Or watch it on YouTube. You can't - they have monopoly. Every dollar they put into the quality of the app is eating into the margin. There's no pressure to increase quality. It needs to just (barely) work so you suffer it enough to watch.
The software engineer can throw out the laziest, fastest turd, the UX designer can do the bare minimum and the product manager can sleep on his job and money will keep coming in.
Good thing there's non-market competition like thepiratebay.org or rarbg.to ;D
There have been several public calls for Apple/Google to ban and block VLC because it allows playback of pirated media. This pressure is just going to increase in the future as more people move away from desktop platforms.
There is always an alternative, and it is likely worse than your customers going to a competitor. Disney et al are going to bring back piracy at the rate they are going.
Plex is going to come under fire from other streaming services if the above ever happen...
jellyfin to the rescue!
NN generated art convinced me that the death of hollywood is just around the corner.
How can you have more than one media monopoly?
Netflix has it backwards, great UX, shit content.
D+ needs to have a UX that's close enough behind the convenience of watching through a pirated channel that it doesn't push users over the hump. Once users go over it's very hard to lure them back.
Chromecast iOS support is pathetic, sometimes it flops and I have to disconnect and restart the app.
Absolutely no user data whatsoever, won’t tell you the last time of the video you watched, doesn’t even tell you if something has been watched, no favorite list, no recommendations.
There’s like 20 major genre’s, you click one and it’s the Viacom backlog in alphabetical order. Stuff from the 40s clumped with stuff from the 80s clumped with stuff from now, it feels like grandpas basement vhs collection.
Idk exactly what’s wrong with it, people can say what they want about Netflix but the UI/UX is vastly superior to these newcomers. This is the Viacom heap.
Disney+, Zee5, ESPN+ were atrocious.
They have a monopoly over Disney content but they don’t have a monopoly over content. Most people, even kids, aren’t constantly watching Disney and if they debase the product by ruining the experience and continually opening up UX advantages for competitors they will erode their consumer base over time. I assume they know this and so the picture isn’t so bleak as you make out (pun not intended.) The reality is they’ve been shoveling money into Disney+ for several years and I’m guessing the quality issues are mainly down to how fast they moved rather than some Dickensian motives. AFAICT the UX quality has improved over time.
May I present to you, the kids of America.
They pretty much own most of what younger americans now consider as culture.
And with their capital, they can easily just buy more without you having a say in it.
They’re a big player for sure and I’m not dismissing the risk from their bulbous size just that no matter how big they get there’s going to be an alternative so there should persist a pressure to compete on UX quality to some degree. The monopoly power I’m far more worried about is how terrible the content becomes when they buy and fully digest an IP.
TPB still exists and that's where I went because the current streaming options suck and are not worth paying for
Perhaps their UX specialists are focused on non-web platforms?
I'm convinced that nobody in any of these companies actually uses their own products.
I really am intrigued by this decision by Netflix. Some PM was probably able to tie autoplay to some metric, but I can't stand it. I wonder if their research showed that older users miss the UX of old-school TVs, where you flip channels and instantly see something playing, rather than having to navigate and select something with more intent.
tl;dr is that they found it helps people more reliably evaluate whether a show/movie is for them, esp. given the increase in unknown IP.
Nothing is particularly wrong but we still have not advanced the state of the art in UX for TVs since ~2008.
Netflix 2008 (you can only browse and play from a queue that you have to curate on the web): https://www.engadget.com/2008-12-23-rokus-hd-netflix-interfa...
Netflix today: https://images.ctfassets.net/4cd45et68cgf/5ZtWfmDAObY7ZSXnKz...
There is no history in some friendly interface, only some deeply buried list in the account settings.
Autoplay (should be optional). Auto continuation (also should be optional).
Horizontal scrolling sections is a bad UX, should be improved somehow.
No quality toggles in the interface, no quality indicator in the interface (e.g. Prime has one, albeit a primitive one "HD" label). I want to know stream resolution being actually received on the device. (btw, they had a test stream for this, it was an ugly solution but it worked, and then years ago they disabled it completely without replacement).
Categories are autosorted and auto chosen. I want to have these categories searchable and preferably browsable.
No quick list of available voice and subtitle languages, you can only know this after you have started watching. Prime has this feature.
No x-ray. I know it's a unique feature, but really, all streaming services should have it.
Perhaps the two most glaring are:
1) Auto-play previews. I'm browsing the unintelligble and randomly sorted lists of cover art trying to find something that looks interesting. If I pause for 2ms too long, like to try to read the title inamongst the graphics, it starts blaring the video at me.
2) I want some idea of what a title is about to decide if I want to watch it. The cover art and an auto-playing preview aren't it. Why can't I read a synopsis of it? See who stars and directed it? Even see the genre? Auto-playing the beginning of the film tells me absolutely nothing about it.
So maybe it’s a good enough UX for their user-base?
Even netflix has its share of shitty UX, still, and they've primarily been a technology company from the get-go.
They also stopped adding content from their massive back catalog. I was looking forward to seeing Disney content from the 50s and 60s but someone decided it’s not worth the cost and effort.
Hulu's UX is way way worse. I can never figure out how to switch episodes for my current show and the "library" shows very few shows at a time, instead they optimized for showing beautiful photos of shows (weird tradeoff)
I do agree with your last point, the search option is borderline unusable for anything other than exact titles. Both those services trail behind Netflix significantly when it comes to search.
It is quite intuitive for my 6 year old. She doesn't care about subtitles, or watching episodes out of order, or who the director is. She clicks on some random princess or whatever and boom it works.
What does this mean?
So yeah, they effectively did delay release for a big chunk of their audience here. It'd be an instant sub in my family, but as it stands, Netflix has more localized kids content (go figure).
What they did is akin to Spotify launching in the US featuring only Swedish music, even if they had US catalogues available.
If I wasn't getting it for free, with Walmart+, which I in turn get for "free" with a credit card, there's no way I'd use it.
The rest are basically interchangeably-mediocre to me. For any of them, if I need to find what's available where, I search elsewhere (justwatch, usually). Search in their actual UI is something I only use to find things I already know exist on the service.
I guess if I had to pick a best one it'd be Hulu, but I also (unlike apparently everyone else?) think HBO's pretty good.
But I only use them on iOS, Android TV (Shield), AppleTV, and Roku. Not on PC, so maybe some of them are really bad there.
I of course quit using that service entirely.
But hey, at least Disney+ doesn't cause the TV to smoke, shake and fall off the wall if you want to rewind like HBO Max does.
And yes, I do have the setting checked to auto play the next episode.