I'm sure now that Amazon Prime Video won't ever get a decent UI, instead the current will remain horrible, but resilient at least.
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.
- 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.
- 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)
Of the 3 services I subscribe to, only Amazon gets things so wrong so often.
It’s also better than one that always says I’m logged out when I start it, and then magically logs me in a minute or two later... while I’m in the process of trying to log in. (Or any of the several other ones that require me to log in nearly every time.)
Of course calling any of these a “User Interface” is almost laughable. SLOM is a better term. That’s “Small Library Obfuscatory Method” for the uninitiated. Or maybe they’re just trying to save bandwidth by making viewers spend viewing time searching pointlessly through their offerings that are ordered seemingly according to the pattern of pigeon droppings outside their office.
But TBH I would just like to watch one video on prime without it being stretched out of shape. It is probably some weird edge case with my particular STB, but every other streaming service seems to manage it properly.
Someone clearly wanted to do something "different and more beautiful than Netflix". The result was basically scrolling through shows one at a time. search was bad. Horrible.
My wife and I tried to re-watch some episodes of Brooklyn 99, and every time we would watch them they would start 20s from the end of the show. Like they stored that we had last watched ending at the end (-0s) and now when coming back months or years later, we might want to resume watching the last 0s with a buffer before (a bad resume behavior).
It seems they finally dropped that UI I'm the last few months to something sane, maybe the same as before I don't remember.
What I'm instead seeing is an attempt at copying Netflix' interface. This is actually far too common - competing services that just copy their competitor's homework when it comes to UI.
I mean it makes sense in a way if you're targeting that service's current members, they're familiar enough with the UI etc.