The Obligatory Blog

DVD’s, Trains and UX

User Experience is a big thing on the internet. Modern websites can be big and complex beasts and it's easy for visitors to a website to be overwhelmed or confused when it comes to finding their way around. It's so easy for a new visitor to your website to leave at the first moment of dissatisfaction, that it's crucial you do everything you can to make their experience using your site easy and enjoyable.

As a web designer I'm immersed all day long in thought and conversation about best practice of creating websites. User Experience (UX) isn't anything new in web design, but it's importance is gaining momentum - what I find surprising is the lack of UX in many non-web situations. Because I spend a lot of time thinking about it in an online context, I also analyise UX of what I'm doing offline.

Here's a couple of particular gripes that have bugged me over the last few days.

1. DVD navigation. Here's what happens: you buy/rent a DVD - put it in the player and (even if you've watched this film dozen's of times) you'll have to sit through about 60 seconds of legal notices, that have been locked so you can't skip them. This, for me, is poor UX. Being forced to sit thorough this the first time you watch the DVD I can just about accept. But not EVERY TIME. The overwhelming majority of people sitting down to watch this DVD will be doing it legally and having their experience interrupted to account for a very minority illegal usage.

Then you might get a couple of minutes of anti-piracy trailers with flashing warnings: "You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone. You wouldn’t steal a DVD." ... all the while I'm thinking - You're right, I wouldn't. And neither will 99% of the people watching this. So why are we being forced to sit through this?

Ironically, I imagine the pirated versions of these DVD's don't have these legal warnings and inadvertently offer viewers a better experience than the legitimate copies.

Then, you might have to wade through a load of trailers. If you can hit 'Menu' and skip all the trailers, not a problem. But often this option is blocked. Sometimes you can fast forward through them, but sometimes even this is blocked. So every time I want to watch that film I have to spend 5 minutes waiting for the trailers to finish.

And then you finally get to the Main Menu. Usually with options like: Play, scene selection, extras, subtitles ... this should be easy. On a website most designers work hard to make the navigation intuative, so you can clearly see what option is selected, or being hovered over and about to be clicked. On too many DVDs it's difficult to see what option is highlighted or which direction you need to move the selection to get to the option you want. Quite often it's made even worse by the surrounding screen content moving around, playing clips of other animated effects. Identifying the menu selection you've made and how you get to the next menu option needs to be made clearer.

2. The Train door Incident. Sometimes, there's stuff you can't do. A feature might not be available yet, or not working for some reason. That's OK - it happens. But it's not OK if you make users go down a series of steps towards a goal and only tell them it's not available at the end. That's wasted their time and left them frustrated.

So, the train door incident: I was catching the train home from work, and the usual scenario happened: no-one pays too much attention to the fine details of the train, we just accept the convention that this is a series of carriages with a door at either end. The train stops and I head for the nearest carriage door. This is a commuter train with electric doors, so to get into the carriage your focus isn't actually on the door it's on the little 'open' button beside the door. I went over to the door and pressed the button. Waited a second or two. Pressed the button again ... still nothing.

The next door along is open so I move over and use that one.

I never saw the piece of paper taped to the door window saying 'out of order'. Why would I? - it's a piece of terrible UX. Firstly I have to go all the way to the door before I can find it's not in use. But then my main focus (the open button) still doesn't give me this information. You might 'think' any user will see a message on the door if they're trying to get through it - but this demonstrates the importance of proper using testing. What you think is going to happen, or what is obvious is often proved to not be the case in actual practice.

John Cowen runs Mekonta - a web design business in Exeter. If you liked this article, subscribe.