In the past year, customer experience has taken a real nosedive. Big brand products and services making baffling choices.
Let’s start with recent Panasonic/Google TVs. With any TV including the good old ones, adjust the volume and it takes about 2 seconds for the volume bar to disappear. Before that if you clicked on any button, the volume bar was go away instantly and that button would engage. But not here.
Change volume and immediately use the left or right d-pad buttons to go through thumbnails on your favourite OTT, and it starts adjusting the volume for you. The fix is obvious: the d-pad should close the volume bar and move the screen position. Not take charge of the volume.
Then there’s Prime Video’s tragic single-row watchlist layout that Netflix copied many months ago for reasons best known to them. Netflix earlier had a 500 entry watchlist capacity. So running through rows of about 7 thumbnails while doing some prioritization in your head was still effortful but manageable.
But with it’s increased limit of 2000 entries, with a single, endless row of thumbnails, odds are in 15 seconds you’ll forget what you set out to do.
Then there’s the Google-Amazon standoff punishing Android users. For over 6 months, you can’t buy Kindle ebooks on the app. Now you must open a browser, log into Amazon, and buy it there. Only because Amazon won’t share revenue through Google’s ecosystem.
YouTube’s saving function too has gotten worse too. Earlier, you could save a video to multiple lists (if you’re someone who has more than the “Watch Later” list). Convenient to sort instructional videos from interviews, while having some of both on the Watch Later. Now, you click one list, and the pop-up disappears. Repeat cycle for each new list you want to save a video to. Why?
Tata 1mg takes over-communication to new heights. What’s good is if you order for medicine requiring prescription but don’t have it on you right then, and the medicine isn’t high up on the red list, their doctor will call, get details, and approve the order. The cool bit, I’ve ordered past 1AM and gotten a call immediately to confirm. It doesn’t hold up order confirmation till next morning.
The flip-side, simply add items to your cart for ordering later, and their sales calls begin. I once missed 6 calls from them, only to nudge me to place that order.
And Motorola’s native app lock, a strong contender for the nightmare UX prize. Normally, app locks create app lists of which apps are locked, and the entries are supposed to stay there. But with Motorola (at least some models), uninstall and reinstall a locked app, and it magically doesn’t reapply the lock. Security theater at its finest.
Did we collectively forget that good design means less friction, not more?
