When developers determine the UX more than designers
Working from home, my lunch breaks can be pretty lonely. Luckily I have video-apps on my phone to keep me company. While I eat my lunch, I watch entertainment like old Seinfeld episodes on Netflix or The Beatles documentary “Get Back” on Disney+ (this one requires a lot of lunchbreaks!). But lately I have mostly been watching Dutch TV-shows on the NPO-app, the video streaming service of the Dutch public broadcasting system.
And boy is it a bad experience.
The NPO-app is a prime example of how sometimes, the user experience is not so much determined by designers, or by content producers, but by developers. Let me explain.
The design of the app is fine. It looks good, it’s got clear navigation, effective search and all the video controls you expect from a streaming app. The problem is also not the content. The content is great! I highly recommend the series “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” en “Sander en de Kloof”. Really, watch it!
What spoils my experience is how the app is built. I don’t know what kind of technical choices they made, and frankly I don’t care. All I know is that it doesn’t work how I expect it to work. The main job of a video-streaming app is just that: to stream video. And that’s where the NPO-app does a terrible job. It’s always freaking loading!
It takes ages for a video to start, and I often have to go back to the previous screen and tap the video again. Before every video, they always show one or two ads. For some reason, the ads always play instantly! Isn’t that magical? But when the actual video is about to start, I just keep waiting and waiting.
When the video is finally playing, there are more problems. I frequently want to pause a video, switch to another app and then come back a minute later. It’s a smartphone, it’s made for multitasking, right? But when I reopen the app, I can’t simply resume where I left off. Every single time, the video reloads from the start (and I have to watch the damn ads again). When I try to find the spot where I left off, I want to use the “skip 10 seconds” button. But that button does the opposite: it rewinds 10 seconds! I can never watch a full episode of anything this way, during my break. To remember where to I left off, I have to take a screenshot, because the NPO-app doesn’t have a ‘resume’ feature.
The problem with the NPO-app is simple: it doesn’t meet my basic expectations. Expectations that have been set by Netflix, Amazon and Disney. Of course the Dutch public broadcasting system doesn’t have the budgets to develop an app like these streaming giants, I get that.
But that doesn’t make it less frustrating for me as a user. Of all my time spent in the NPO-app, I estimate that close to 50% is not watching video but all the hassle around it. Can you imagine any other app, where only half of the time you can do what you actually want to do? Still, every time, I’m patient enough to cope with it. So my frustration is not so big that I take the effort to write a review in the App Store. Instead, I write a blogpost about it.