Ask HN: Why is Disney+ UX so bad?

Because you can't go anywhere else to see the same content so why spend money on the quality of the software? There's no market competition there so you'll suffer the cheapest product to see their content.

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.

>There's no market competition

Good thing there's non-market competition like thepiratebay.org or rarbg.to ;D

That competition has been massively curtailed by move to walled garden devices running iOS and Android. It's starting to be harder and harder for those alternatives to exist.

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.

This attitude needs to die in the business world. Particularly in entertainment offerings and cloud subscriptions.

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.

I too agree, piracy is the only valid approach against media-mononopolies.

Small cluster servers serving local friend networks content will be the future.

Plex is going to come under fire from other streaming services if the above ever happen...

jellyfin to the rescue!

I actually think NN dreaming up movies, depending on noise, the realtime reactions and the heroes journey will be the future. Just add a consistency layer on top (keep same face on the cast and name-consistent(place, enemy, protagonists, mc guffins) , the rest can be made up).

NN generated art convinced me that the death of hollywood is just around the corner.

> media-mononopolies

How can you have more than one media monopoly?

Monopoly on the content.

By "the content" I assume you mean specific IP such as Star Wars, because nobody has monopoly on "content" at large. Anybody can create content, new stories, new characters. People do it all the time!

Yes. Content that they own IP of.

I mean, we had that with having DVD/BR players being separate from the media they play. But meanwhile I daily see people on this very site demand and applaud this kind of vertical consolidation and death of choice on every level.

Unfortunately, they don’t have to do anything because content is king.

Netflix has it backwards, great UX, shit content.

Piracy IS the competition in UX.

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.

fmovies et al are pretty hard to beat. They have an extremely large selection that goes across all services and in my experience often have better image quality. I was comparing Netflix to fmovies recently and Netflix was looking like hot garbage. Also no need to log in, just enter the website into the URL and you're good to go. Very straightforward and fast user interface, even comments.

This, Paramount+ is another 08’ era Netflix-like turd.

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.

Lol, torrents or finding DVDs are always the alternative for me. I want to support these companies but it’s so infuriating the way they treat users, even implicitly with the user experience. I have HBO which has been great. Criterion too.

Disney+, Zee5, ESPN+ were atrocious.

> they have monopoly

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.

> Most people, even kids, aren’t constantly watching Disney

May I present to you, the kids of America.

Disney isn't just cartoons. They also bought (together with copyright and IP rights) 20th Century Fox, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar and many others.

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.

> 20th Century Fox, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar and many others.

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.

You're missing the point. Sure, they have monopoly content (so does Netflix, etc.). But they don't have a monopoly on entertainment, and most (or many) people can easily be satisfied by competing content or even forms on entertainment.

This. Sure, they have a monopoly on particular content, but I can certainly find other forms of entertainment. A small fraction of the audience may absolutely require Disney properties, but many people don't. Substitution is a real thing, and the force of the monopoly is thus limited.

>Because you can't go anywhere else to see the same content

TPB still exists and that's where I went because the current streaming options suck and are not worth paying for

>I doubt that Disney+'s interface is intuitive to anyone

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.

This. It’s a great interface for a kid. Find the thumbnail of the thing you want to watch, press a button. Kids will rewatch the same episode repeatedly, so the interface is optimized for that.

Yeah, Disney+ is bad. But have you seen Paramount+? They think Star Trek nerds will put up with anything. As a Star Trek nerd, I found the UI of Transmission to be much better. ;-)

Yeah, what's up with that pause behavior? Clicking anywhere on the screen pauses the player, which is fine. But then what you're watching goes into a small box in the bottom left, and if you click the same spot you clicked to pause, expecting the video to resume, you'll instead be redirected to Paramonut+'s main page.

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.

Couple of thoughts. Firstly, you need good product people to be working on these things. You also need people at the company actually using the product. I wonder how many senior Disney execs actually watch on Disney+.

Counter 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?

>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.

'good product people' jumped out at me.

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 good product people to be working on these things.

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.

Forget that, I want to know which bright minds at Disney decided to launch Disney+ in a foreign language country (Croatia) without offering dubbed version which they already have for virtually all their content.

Lol the greed is real

> without offering synchronized version

What does this mean?

I meant dubbed (edited, thanks).

I see. So you'd rather they delay release? What about people who can listen in the original language or who are OK watching with subtitles?

They already have the dubbed content - no need to delay. And a big part of the content in question is aimed at people who can't listen in the original language and are not OK watching with subtitles - namely, small kids.

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.

Ah I misinterpreted. Thanks for clarifying.

You should have seen the search input when it initially launched on the samsung tv app. The alphabet was spread on a single horizontal. So if you wanted Zorro or Zootopia, you're pressing right to get to Z 25 times. They've since updated to the better numberpad-ish style input that netflix/others uses though.

Counterpoint: I never use subtitles, I’ve never had trouble with focus/space bar, I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to search by director… I go to Disney+ I click on a Marvel movie I watch it I’m happy.

So maybe it’s a good enough UX for their user-base?

I have only used Disney+ on a smart TV and Apple TV. It is on par with any other app on these platforms. I have seen several children work it without any instruction.

Perhaps their UX specialists are focused on non-web platforms?

They all are. Netflix's UX is garbage, as is Amazon Prime. And Now TV manages to be even worse than all of the rest put together.

I'm convinced that nobody in any of these companies actually uses their own products.

What's wrong with the netflix UI? I think it's actually the best one, my only complaint is that they constantly change the order of the rows so I'm always looking for "continue watching" one. I'm sure they have some data that by doing that they increase some KPI, but it's really fucking annoying.

Autoplaying video is the bad part of Netflix UI, otherwise it's great. I don't know how to turn it off, and it is so annoying that I can't stop on any video while scrolling, I have to just keep moving.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

I toggled that back when they added it. Netflix still does it for me. IDK if they reset it at some point or what, but it's bizarre that "make the UI not be legendarily terrible" is opt-in to begin with.

I wasn't able to get autoplay off on Netflix via Roku on one of my TVs.

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.

Rationale: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/new-netflix-tv-experience-...

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.

> What's wrong with the netflix UI?

Nothing is particularly wrong but we still have not advanced the state of the art in UX for TVs since ~2008.

Really?

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...

MyList cut after certain number of entries. Entries stay in Mylist after I've watched them (ok, this is a feature actually, but it certainly should be optional). MyList is not searchable and there are no categories or filters there. I can't add to Mylist without hovering over preview (no quick context menu).

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.

Others have mentioned a lot of the problems already, so yeah, those.

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.

You haven’t seen BT Sport. Imagine a 5 hour event with no markers for the individual fights.

Apple TV + on the computer is awful as well. Like they woke up brand new with no prior knowledge of how folks use streaming services at all.

And not just in the discovery phase, core play/pause, show me this show’s details page, okay next episode stuff.

Captive audience is a huge part of why they don’t improve, but you’d think some PMs over there would have pride in their work enough to fight for some basic quality of life improvements. Alas.

Ideally streaming companies don't want you (user) to do anything, the less you can the better. Ideally you would click on the Streaming Corp URL or open an app, and then video/music/podcast would start automagically and match your expectation and straming would continue seamlessly forever. While they can't really do this (profitably) yet, they certainly regularly try to get there. That's why there is autoplay everywhere, "smart" lists and playlists, and always on continuous playback.

PS: after some thinking I've realised that I've just described a TV. Yup, that's what they want to give us someday - a Netflix TV, a Disney TV, an Amazon TV, maybe structured into several TV channels because one wouldn't be enough. Call them channels - Netflix Channel 1, then Channel 2 etc. :)

1) D+ is still quite young. Optimizing UIs in this space seems to takes time, going by other development of other services.

2) These are not breaking problems. They are annoying, and for technical people probably more than for casual users. But they are not on a level which will reach major attention.

3) D+ is a streaming-service, so they care more about quality of video. And even there they fail pretty often. For such a big company, it's quite surprising how much they still need to learn.

> but I doubt that Disney+'s interface is intuitive to anyone.

No, it is. On surface, it's a copy of Netflix and Amazon Video, so people have no problem using it, because they know the routine.

Netflix and Amazon Prime are hands-down the worst streaming services I've used, as far as UI. Netflix was good for a couple years but has been going downhill ever since.

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.

HBO is horrible for me. Half the time I use the rewind feature on the web app the whole thing breaks so I have to refresh and of course it doesn't remember where I left off. Also I guess my screen is too big or something because the right half of it is just a blank column on some of the pages?

A disturbing event: one of the streaming services I get thru my Fire TV is now banging on about paying so it will remember where I left off. They want me to pay or they will actively forget where I am in a movie etc.

I of course quit using that service entirely.

People are used to bad software. There are lots of terrible software engineers out there who don't give much thought to user experience, and there are lots of PMs who don't know how to provide a sufficient level of specs. Orgs get big enough that inefficiencies are abundant, and "not my problem" becomes endemic. And then there are the PHBs in non-software-centric orgs who see software as an expense rather than a value center, and so try to cut costs and tighten deadlines.

Even netflix has its share of shitty UX, still, and they've primarily been a technology company from the get-go.

I agree with others regarding the consistency across all streaming services as pretty disparate hard to use user experiences.

That said building for web, iOS, Android, consoles, PCs, macOS and so on means trying to be consistent for your service. Which then leads to issues & challenges, and less consistency with respect to competitors.

I’d be curious to know how often people tend to favor whichever service they used first, and how often people grow tired of services they really like for content but hate for subjectively bad user experience.

I think as a general rule all of the streaming services are spending most of their engineering time/budget on their apps for mobile and TV platforms rather than their websites. Presumably because that's where more people are watching. But also because there's a lot of platforms to cover with apps (iOS, Android, Roku, Tizen, PlayStation, Xbox, etc).

I certainly expect a gradient of quality from the web to the Xbox to iOS (increasing in that order) when I'm choosing which device to watch something on.

My guess: most use Disney+ on their TV or mobile device. Very few use it on the website. The UI/UX is certainly not the best even on those devices but it's good enough (TM).

> - subtitle settings get reset every time I close the website.

I also find this ridiculous and annoying, but... I've found a "solution". Just open a mobile Disney+ app (I've used the iOS one) and set the subtitles/audio language there and this change is persistent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IMHO all the modern "streaming" UIs suck, but the Disney+ is definitely the worst I've experienced.

A different thing but related: why is Spotify's queue a queue and not a deque? Late Google Play Music had a deque, Tidal has a deque. I often create a long queue of songs and then remember to add a few more to the beginning. With Spotify I have to add them to the end and then manually scroll them all the way to the top. Actually that's one of two reasons why I chose Tidal and not Spotify when GPM died (the other one is that they pay more to the artists).

why did GPM die?

Because Google managers needed to create another product? They replaced it with YouTube Music

Honestly my least favorite feature of any streaming app is when clicking on a show on the main screen resumes where you left off. It's convenient for sure but being able to restart the episode before it loads the episode and then having to go back to the selection screen is nice.

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.

It has some weird annoyances on Apple TV too.

If you resume watching an episode in a series, then want to get back into the episode list for that series i always end up back on the Apple TV Home Screen a couple of times before figuring out the button presses needed.

And slightly unrelated whinge, the old Ducktales isn’t in the kids account, you have to be on an adult account to see it for some weird reason.

Because it just boils down to the content that's available! Also it's a newer app to be fair.

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)

HBO Max has a nice 'feature' where it shows a ten second timer at the end of the episode and jumps to the next. For some shows, there is a final scene and it exits a little early so you miss the last bit. If you want to catch them all you need to click an x next to the countdown for each episode.

I don’t know about any of those problems, but my biggest gripe is that when I finish an episode it waits until the very end of the credits before letting me click the next episode. I’ve now resorted to going back to the menu and clicking the next episode manually.

And yes, I do have the setting checked to auto play the next episode.

The worst: 3-5minute credits that you can’t skip at the end of each episode. Guess how great this is for a toddler :)

I only watch it on a smart TV, and I’ve had similar problems with HBO Max’s UI. Disney+ is fairly smooth, and comparable to Netlix.

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.

A broader question is why streaming services UX is so bad, universally?

One obvious example, is trailer auto-play that cannot be disabled, prevalent in nearly every streaming service I can think of.

Streaming services are extremely user-hostile. Best bet is to not use them. Torrents and Usenet are still a thing.

Another one: Starting a new video will result in audio being muted 80 % of the time.

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.

This has never happened to me on iOS App, Fire TV app, on browser.

Safari.

The names of shows/movies are so small too, really needs a redesign.

Because nobody watches it on the web. They could ditch the web player altogether and lose ~0 subscribers.

They don't have an app for MacOS or Linux, so for Mac and Linux users the web is the only way to watch.

I mean nobody watches it on computers. Smart TV / streaming stick / etc.

I wonder what their internal stats look like. Both my wife and I like watching films on a laptop while curled up in bed. I know my daughter watches on her laptop in her room when she wants to watch something alone. But we might be the only three.

I get the feeling nobody does user testing, so user's goals are not a priority as a result.

Probably because with a price of USD1.5 a month it doesn't have competition

HBO Max is another bad example, such a huge step backwards from HBO Go.

Building good software is hard, even when you an infinite pocket.

Probably "designed" by a software developer.

Because it increases engagement.

It works well on the TV

terrible UX is the norm, its mostly darkpatterns made to extract as much profit from users as possible