It used to be pretty nice to navigate, you go to the show page and there's a list of the episodes they have available and their air dates, along with another list of clips and webisodes. You also have recommended related shows, information about when new episodes are released. Hovering over any title shows a brief description of the episode.
Then on each individual episode page, discussion about the show.
Within the viewers, heat graph timelines available showing what parts people watched the most.
All this is gone.
Instead, animated episode titles in a slide show. Can't find a list of episodes available, seems to not exist except by playing catch-the-moving-tile, a frustrating game with little pay off. Discussions are now in a comments section which seems to be empty on most pages. Pages are slow to load.
No doubt the UI experts that created this monstrosity are the best and the brightest, from the latest schools with the most contemporary techniques. They always are.
I use Hulu daily, and am a subscriber, and I have to say I LOVE this new layout. I clicked on popular shows. Clicked on The Office. Drop down by season. Zipped through the episodes, and picked one.
I don't think it gets any easier than this.
It also remembered the last episode I was watching above the other episodes. Perfect.
Before, to pick a season, you had to pick 1 or the highest season, then do a strange paging thing to get all the way back to the first episode. It was a mess.
The viewing area is now larger it seems, with more "black" area around it without having to turn on the night vision thing.
At any rate, as an avid user, I think they nailed it.
First thing I did was click Browse->TV->Popular. List of shows. Click on a Show. Right under episodes to the right there is a drop-down with the list of available episodes.
I am not saying its perfect, but is it nearly as bad as you are making it out to be?
I am not seeing that. Let's take the top TV show that I see on the Popular page right now that you mention - http://new.hulu.com/grimm. The drop down says "All Seasons (24 episodes)". It's a filter for the horizontal slide show viewer to limit it to only season 1 or season 2. There's no list of episodes. There's also a sort order drop down with default "air date", although air dates are not shown nor listed, it's just to select that as the sorting order. Do you mean some other drop down?
I haven't seen the new Hulu yet (blocked by corporate proxy), but their old design was only good when I was logged out. Once I logged in, the "popular shows" list was removed and replaced with "your friends recently watched...". That option may still have been around, but I never found it.
No bitterness, but intense frustration when usability takes a hit. Based on experience, the bigger preview images and the gee whiz animation will be found to be appreciated among test subjects and the redesign thus proclaimed a success. But the new difficulties in finding shows to watch, and to comment on and thus engage with, will result in fewer views as time goes by.
Animated transitions, slow alpha fade ins for menus and popovers, and huge fonts are the latest design fad and is a must have for 2012 sites. If it makes actual usability worse, it doesn't matter.
This evening I went there, saw a clip for The Office. This caused be to wonder if it had started or was about to start, so I went to the show page. No longer are there air dates shown. The clip I saw that was featured it wasn't clear if it was a preview from the next season or something from the past (I didn't remember seeing it). Went to find the episode list and found it doesn't exist anymore. Went to find discussion to see if others were talking about when the shows start and comments were empty. Couldn't accomplish anything I wanted to. I'm going to say that's a usability failure, at least compared to last year's design. There's a lot of room for improvement on Hulu so a redesign is not unwelcome. It's always been challenging to find what recently broadcast TV shows are available, one has to click on multiple next/prev tabs on multiple layers of sliding shows. But rather than add a list that shows a lot in a compact space, they removed the list from other areas and copied the difficult parts of their site onto the parts that were actually working.
Not all the changes in the last few months are bad. The hover text on the play controls are nice, explaining that clicking the volume icon does mute, and that the round arrow means 10 second rewind. But overall the new design has many things that are a step backward.
If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list.
>comments were empty.
Hulu switched to Facebook comments awhile ago and didn't seem to import the old ones. I don't think anything changed with respect to that within the past week.
I'm not sure that the reliance on images instead of text is all that bad. At least for episodes, you only need to scroll for the current season (there is a separate combobox for choosing which season to view) so unless a show is more frequent than weekly, you'll only need to scroll like four or five times and the episode numbers are prominently displayed. For clips and daily shows where Hulu maintains a large number of episodes, I can see the inconvenience, though.
Edit: Yes, the delays can be annoying. Since everything is shown sequentially, I'm not sure that one would normally need to view a lot of the hover text but I imagine at times it could get annoying.
> If you want to see the air date, you can do so by highlighting the video/clip in the list.
OK, thanks, I do see it in the hover panel, which triggers after about 300ms and does a 200ms or so alpha fade in, so there's a half second latency per view, grrr, and then only 3 to 6 at a time visible depending on whether the window is expanded to 1920 pixels wide. I have a lot of pixels on my screen and full screen can only show 6 things at once, grrr. So in about 3 seconds I can see 3 air dates, then move mouse to side of window to click on slide show advance to see the next set, and then hover one pane at a time, wait a half second, then the next. Grrrr.
The intentional sluggish design anti-pattern: grrrr.
The massive space needed to show small amount of info design anti-pattern: grrrr.
> Hulu switched to Facebook comments
Arg, is that what happened. It's Facebook only then? We block all Facebook domains. Hulu had a system that was clunky but at least it was possible to work before. Grrrr.
Perhaps you're just so accustomed to the old interface, it's really hard for some people to adapt to a new UI. People said the same thing about the "old" facebook layout, but nobody remembers that layout anymore. I'm sure we'll hear gripes about this new UI for a few months and then nobody will remember what the old hulu looked like.
Facebook didn't boost the font size, make posts take up a larger amount of space in the feed, add sluggish animations, hide information behind popups that take a full second to appear, etc.
(I didn't even know episode thumbnails had popups in the new design. Then I read jaredsohn's post and went to check. Then I thought it had a bug in Firefix because I couldn't get them to show up. Turns out I wasn't waiting long enough.)
There are some definite usability issues with Hulu's update.
Well of course it does. Hulu does not want to sell to the majority of the world population, that's a pretty significant issue.
Also, it's irrelevant whether it's Hulu's fault or not. It needs to be brought up regularly, to put pressure on everyone (including Hulu). If we ignore the issue, we accept the status quo.
Look at it another way: for a large number of HN readers this news item is just an annoyance. Something we can't even check out. You see a news item, you click on the link and get a "nyah nyah nothing for you here, just go away". I'd say that merits a mention in the comments.
>its not changing anytime soon, and its not even Hulu's fault.
Of course it's Hulu's fault. Hulu's owned by NBC, FOX, and Disney. I am certain those three content providers could retain world-wide internet streaming rights for their shows and make them available in any number of countries.
As long as they make it impossible for the rest of the 6.4 billion people to watch their site, they're not only leaving money on the table, but they're encouraging people to pirate.
Quoting the old Erlang meme: did you just tell me to go ---- myself?
Seriously. I won't jump through hoops to give others my money, broken copyright or not. I don't see a huge push by those companies to change the way things are. Wheres the lobbying for a global copyright or easier access rules? Where are the visible changes? As long as all those efforts don't lead to a change, they won't have my business.
I don't think you should pay them. I certainly don't. I was merely pointing out how I've been able to watch Hulu content while traveling outside the US.
You could try purchasing a prepaid Visa, Mastercard, or American Express gift card online and have it shipped to you. I see that amazon.com has various prepaid gift cards. Another option I'd be less excited about is a "reloadable" (i.e. Green Dot) debit card. I believe most US issued reloadable cards require a social security number however.
This is an interesting comment. I take it for granted that the majority of readers are pretty comfortable doing that kind of thing. Is there any way of telling what the real distribution is?
I doubt it. Maybe a survey. I'm one out of three. I could set up a socks proxy in chrome. As for the others, I'm sure I could learn them, but I have no idea where to start.
Wow, what a great site. I love the design of their new "our video library can only be streamed within the United States" message. Very readable, good typography, a big improvement over the previous version. This redesign is definitely a success!
Taking a few minutes, looking around, it's fine. In fact, I dig it. But was design ever the problem for Hulu? Content is king here, and Hulu just doesn't have it.
As a viewer, I expect a site like this has to either be niche, or truly all encompassing. I think things like Stargate or Highlander could support their own sites. Comedy Central was smart to do their stuff (South Park, Daily Show, Colbert) by show. CBS even does Star Trek on StarTrek.com. Hulu seems to try to do everything, but fails. I genuinely think they could do better if they spun off niche sites, crediting them all as "Brought to you by Hulu".
I am anxious to give Hulu my money, however the paid "plus" membership has way too many ads. I understand they have their business plan numbers worked out, but the payed membership shouldn't have the same number of ads as the free version.
There's a wildly successful and profitable business model for getting money for TV content. It's cable and satellite subscriptions. More than half of all households in the US pay for a cable subscription.
Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from the major networks for free -- just connect an antenna to your TV. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to cable or satellite. Subscribing doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.
Hulu is an exact replica of the business model, except using the web instead of radio and cable lines, as the delivery method.
Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from Hulu for free -- just browse to their website. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to Hulu Plus. Subscribing to Hulu Plus doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.
The only difference is that a cable subscription averages more than 10 times the monthly cost of Hulu Plus. To expect to not only pay 90% less than cable, but also eliminate the advertising, is unrealistic.
They're not. Netflix doesn't carry any currently airing season of network or premium television. Netflix is the new Blockbuster, Hulu is the new cable company. Both of those consumer models have to exist for the content production funding model to continue working the way it works.
Netflix isn't going to produce a full prime time lineup of shows every year on $8 per subscriber. Not at the costs networks currently pay for production ($1.5-2 million per episode generally... with hit shows up to $10-15 million per episode). Either the ads stay, or they figure out a way to produce shows of the same quality for much less money.
To give some perspective, more than $60 billion is spent on TV advertising per year in just the US. So if everyone were to just sell subscriptions at Netflix's price, in exchange for new television without ads, they would need to get... every person in the United States (including all the babies) to subscribe. Twice, per person. Just to make up for the ad revenue, ignoring all the lost revenue of people dropping cable subscriptions. Otherwise, the money that currently funds producing these shows just won't exist, so there won't be anything for them to sell you.
There is no future with everyone on an ad-free Netflix for new TV with content that costs as much to produce as today's network television.
The obvious answer seems to be that the cost of production needs to come down. I wonder how cheaply today's shows could be made if they didn't have the bureaucracy and bloat of the major content publishers behind them?
The old slideshow was amazingly annoying. You click, it slides by slowly but doesn't reveal the text. You wait some more until the text slowly fades in...nope not interesting. You click again.
I would still make the text fade in faster.
The new layout looks very nice. I would make the hover details appear faster as well, only a sliver of time after the play button appears.
The title in the hover-details should be more obviously clickable. Personally, I really don't like having to blindly mouse around until I stumble upon something clickable (even though it seems like the trendy thing to do).
I rarely use the website to watch Hulu, and really don't get much value out of Hulu Plus on console. I wish they'd put effort into licensing worthwhile content vs.
(Also, Amazon Prime streaming is usually HORRIBLE video quality for me, as well as selection. Netflix is really the only non-pirated service with decent selection and quality, and even it really lacks for selection compared to 2y ago. But I don't want to pay $20/movie for iTunes movies.)
Amazon Instant Video is great though... except that you must use a browser to purchase videos. You can then access them in your "Instant Video Library" on console.
I agree, Amazon Instant Video (free with Prime) is wonderful. The best bang for money, two birds one stone, but one thing I have noticed is that they hardly get new contents and yet they still expire the old ones. Its been 4 months and the "Recently Added" section remains untouched for both movies and shows.
Quality still horrible, even on paid content. I have a 1080p projector fed from a ps3, xbox, appletv, and for each, I get what looks like SD, and overcompressed at that.
Yellowstone (HD) on a Mac (in Chrome) also appears SD-quality. I'm on 100M comcast business, and everything else works fine, with Amazon reporting it's in HD mode with good performance, so I think it's just crap encoding :(
One of the more interesting things about this new version is its "face match" feature. It allows you to highlight over an actors face and it gives you card of information about them.
Then on each individual episode page, discussion about the show.
Within the viewers, heat graph timelines available showing what parts people watched the most.
All this is gone.
Instead, animated episode titles in a slide show. Can't find a list of episodes available, seems to not exist except by playing catch-the-moving-tile, a frustrating game with little pay off. Discussions are now in a comments section which seems to be empty on most pages. Pages are slow to load.
No doubt the UI experts that created this monstrosity are the best and the brightest, from the latest schools with the most contemporary techniques. They always are.