the low bar

An excellent post by John Siracusa (a) outlining the most elementary features that the UI of any video-streaming service should have and (b) showing how rarely (if ever) the existing services meet that low bar. This is something that I think about almost every day: How absolutely incompetent the coding is of the streaming services I use. And in my experience music services are almost as bad.

(Apple’s purchase of Primephonic last year gave me a tiny bit of hope that I’d eventually have an app that allows me to listen to classical music without, for instance, having to deal with truncated and hence incomprehensible track listings for classical music — but I’m still waiting for Apple’s version of the service to be released, and am not confident that it ever will be.)

More generally, it seems to me that UI design in software has been getting worse over the past decade, and I wonder why that is. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle software, on every platform, is buggy, and seems increasingly to be focused more on trying to sell me books than on making my reading experience a good one. Yet another reason — there are several — why I’ve almost completely stopped buying Kindle books, though I still use the device for reading, e.g., Project Gutenberg books. But confusing or inappropriate UI design is not solely the province of Amazon — it seems to be becoming endemic. That’s impressionistic and anecdotal, to be sure; if I weren’t preoccupied by other things I’d try to support my claim. But hey, just read Siracusa’s excellent post.