Netflix for iPad

• December 27th, 2010
• send to twitter
• found in design
• tagged with
  app, ios, ipad, netflix, user-experience

Netflix has always seemed like a great advocate for the user, so I’ve been very surprised by their iPad app:

1. Rows of movie suggestions don’t scroll with gestures. This isn’t just a nice feature, it’s contrary to one’s conditioning.
2. You can’t rate movies — or at least you can’t tap the stars to do so. And if you could, the stars are so close to the Play button that you usually end up tapping it instead. This is extremely frustrating, as you end up waiting a lot because the movie starts buffering.
3. When you tap a movie’s icon (the cover of the movie), you get a modal window. But from there, you can’t add the movie to your queue — huh?
4. It would be nice to be able to collapse some of the rows of suggestions and have it remember their positions. I’m rarely interested in “Gripping Documentaries”.
5. The Add to Queue button should change to Remove from Queue if the item is already in your queue. Or at least just disable the button.

And, not specific to the iPad, why when you watch a movie instantly does it remain on your DVD queue (and vice versa)?

There’s probably a lot I’m missing, as these are just the things that got between me and simply hitting the play button last night. Netflix, it’s time to ditch the website wrapped in an iOS app and design this thing for real.

the experience of applying for a job at a design studio should not be painful

• January 27th, 2010
• send to twitter
• found in design,
  web and apps
• tagged with
  form, job-application, user-experience

UPDATED: I’m not trying to pick on them specifically. Most of the forms I found were just as bad.

As you probably know, I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs recently. It seems like the studios that emphasize user experience design in their client work, and as a requirement for their applicants, have some of the worst experiences for applying.

Lots of companies just provide a mailto:, which is generally a bad way to offer a contact option online. It’s not great, but at least it’s not absolutely insanely frustrating like the form featured on HUGE’s website. (At this point, I recommend you go over to their site and try it out for yourself.) I promise this isn’t me being bitter because they didn’t hire me. But since they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to give me a job, at least I can give them a little free advice, no benefits or vacation time due.

1. When you click ‘Apply’ in the job description page, it pops up a modal box. Now, I love modal boxes because I equally dislike changing pages. However, a modal box with a scroll bar is a joke. Take me to a page with an application form.

2. The close button is in the lower right. Below the scroll bar. WTF? This is nonstandard for every — single — operating system. Ever.

3. The ‘Insert a resume’ button at the top of the form opens another modal box (yes, a modal box inside a scrolling modal box) whose design is Windows95 worthy. It then proceeds to insert the text of your document into the text fields lower in the form, thus entirely breaking the formatting. At best, it looks like shit. At worst, it’s unreadable. You’d think, from casual experience using websites and standard design patterns, that it would upload the .pdf. No. Wrong. Also, if you’re applying for a design position you’d think they’d like to see how you set a page that is nothing but type. If you’re not applying for a design position, it would be nice to know that the applicant can create a professional document.

There are also similar links above the fields themselves. Huh?

4. The technology used to parse the .pdf into the form fields sucks. As in, it thought that the filename was my last name. Yes, I’m Jacob Resume_v3.2.

I don’t expect it to work perfectly, but if it’s that bad just don’t use it.

5. This is minor in comparison, but you denote mandatory fields with an asterisk, but insist on still putting a horizontal rule and the text ‘Optional information’ for the fields that follow them.

6. The final ‘eff you’ in the experience is the automated response you get. Gee, thanks. I took the time to fight with your stupid form so that I could ask for a job, yet you couldn’t take the time to acknowledge that? Seems like a fair trade. I know you get a lot of applications, so just have the form confirm that it received the application and spare me the automated response. Or at least rewrite the copy so that I could possibly be tricked into thinking it was written by a human being.

In light of this horrid design, who are you to judge my work? That said, I’m still looking for a job so if you need someone to redesign it, please use my contact form (I promise, it won’t make you cry out of frustration).