Getting Ultra Violent about Ultraviolet | Hacker News Reader

Getting Ultra Violent about Ultraviolet

martinbelam.com

23 pointsjumpbug7 comments

One interesting takeaway I had from this experience is that it's really a combination of many failures in the user experience that makes this such a frustrating experience. Had there been but one or two pitfalls along the way it probably would have gone ok, but instead even as a reader I am left upset about the process and failures here. But thinking about their developers, it was probably many different people or even many different teams that worked on each part of this, and are all probably unaware of each other's failures.

Thus, it's reminds me quite of a bit of the engineering crisis of 1978 for the Citigroup building which only reached crisis levels because of so many combined cut corners and failures together http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_cr...

In both cases (UV and the building) is there were plenty of successful designs that could have been copied from.

It's even sadder in the case of UV that there must have been no end user testing before shoveling this out on the customer. Add on the entire website seems designed to extract information on Facebook accounts so they can keep tabs on you, it's obvious that none of this is about customer satisfaction or usability, but about new ways to monetize the customer and give them as little service as possible.

Another example of using the same email for Facebook and for this app, the ultraviolet site tries to use the email you gave it with Facebook, if you pick a different password (as this person did (good for you!) it fails the login but the email is accepted. So the Ultraviolet guys think "oh you just mistyped your facebook password."

Ultraviolet loses for a number of reasons and this just highlights a few of them.

DIVX V2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX (note: not the video codec)

"How to make your product fail by ignoring the failures of the past" (Piracy is free, Apple is easy, lets make are products hard to use and expenive in this market)

The first instruction is to go to BBCUltraViolet.com. So I typed BBCUltraViolet.com into my browser as instructed, and immediately hit a “website not found” error. I tried some variations like .co.uk or bbc.ultraviolet.com, but no joy. So I Googled it. And discovered that the website doesn’t work without having www. appended to the front of the URL.

Not that this is your fault, but modern browsers will automatically append the www prefix when needed.

No, that isn't true. Some sites will redirect from example.com to www.example.com, but if the user inputs example.com and that URL isn't set up, the browser won't recover from that. Try it for yourself if you don't believe me. :)

Ah. Works in FF but not in Chrome.

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