User Experience Has Consequences

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

It’s often quite obvious when companies don’t actually use the products they produce. Joel Spolsky talked about this over twenty years ago in an anecdote about his time at Juno:¹

Guess what email product was used internally at Juno Online Services? … Hmm, did you guess Juno? Since that was, uh, our product?

No. A couple of people, including the president, used Juno at home. The other 175 of us used Microsoft Outlook.

And for good reasons! The Juno client was just not such a great email client; for two years the only thing we worked on was better ways to show ads. A lot of us thought that if we had to use the product, we would have to make it better, if only to stop our own pain. The president was very insistent that we show popup ads at six different points in time, until he got home and got six popup ads, and said, “You know what? Maybe just two popups.”

Unsurprisingly, the people not realizing how much ads irritate people are still at it.

Plex, if you didn’t know, produces software to allow a mildly technically knowledgeable person to set up a server in the their home (or elsewhere, I guess) to serve up their movies and TV shows and whatever to apps on their phones or set top boxes or just a web browser. You rip them from Bluray or DVD (or acquire them however you personally acquire such things), stick the files in the place the server expect them, named in the way the server expects them, and then you can watch them, because Plex has done a great job making sure it mostly Just Works. So this appealed to me: I’m a somewhat technically knowledgeable person, I like to watch movies, and especially I like to rewatch movies. (Even assuming that Netflix has what I want to watch, relying on them to continue to have it when I want to rewatch it seems quixotic at best.)

Their apps also have a section which allows you to watch, with ads, some movies that you personally don’t own, which they’ve presumably negotiated rights for. We cut the cable cord in 2009, and I don’t really watch broadcast TV either, so it’s been a while since I’ve seen commercials with any regularity; but tonight I figured I could put up with some ads for the sake of watching Ip Man 2.

As I write this, I have not yet finished the movie. I have, technically, only been shown two separate ads, but I’ve been shown those ads many times. Most of the occasions have just been Ad 1 then Ad 2, which was eyerolling after the first time, but bearable. But for the last straw, I was shown Ad 1 four times in a row, one after the other, then Ad 2, then Ad 1 again, just for good measure: just over 6 continuous minutes of repetitive advertising. I don’t know enough about the advertising business to have a guess about why this happens, but I can safely say it’s a poor user experience. (And as long as I’m complaining, the ads were poorly timed for the action as well.)

I mean, maybe Plex is making enough money selling these ads that they don’t care. But I’ll probably stick to my own movies in future.