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.
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.