CBS All Access
/Some time ago, I worked at CBS News, as an assistant producer on a weekly primetime news magazine. During my years there, I developed a profound appreciation and respect for CBS as a company, its institutions, methods, and dedication to quality.
CBS is among several new-content providers, formerly associated with Hulu, which have left the nest and struck out on their own, breeding an interesting variety of approaches to on-demand online content delivery across multiple device platforms. With all due respect, I find the results less than successful.
Both as an exposition of the Empathic UX approach, as well as an illustration of the role of interaction design vs. visual design, I’ve chosen to share a closer look at the CBS All Access app.
Visuals & Interaction
Visually, the app has a contemporary, clean, and appealing design, and is not the focus of this post, except in so much as that visual design contrasts sharply with its less-laudable interaction design.
In UX training and practice it is common to remind ourselves that, “you are not the user,” essentially as an admonition against allowing the design and development team’s greater knowledge of the project’s goals and features to lead us to assumptions about our users’ probable actions. This is a wise practice, however, it also has the inverse and negative effect, of cutting designers off from, “walking a mile in our users’ moccasins.” We interview, survey, and study our users, without completing the, “last mile,” of attempting (to the extent possible) to be our users, to see the experience through our users’ eyes and goals.
As an example, I was part of a design group building a piece of business software. We captured the users’ functional needs, the features that would facilitate their tasks, but that team of career software professionals, deeply passionate and engaged themselves in their work activities, could not intuit the emotional needs of these particular users, whose tasks are, “just a job,” and user engagement depended more on making, “tolerable necessities,” into, “pleasing activities.” A missed opportunity.
A video entertainment application, of course, is an entirely different scenario. No need to make the tolerable into the pleasing, but every need to make the pleasing stand out from other offerings in a market increasingly glutted with competition. Ease of use and effective leveraging of data-driven UX can make the mundane magical, increasing both user satisfaction and profitability. The designers’ empathetic ability--trained and/or inherent--and their ability to transmit those insights to the rest of the development team, with clarity and repeatability—much more so than personas and user stories--leads directly to improved results.
Sample Interaction
I have looked at both the Xbox and iPhone experiences of the CBS app, finding sufficient commonalities in their design to extrapolate that the experience is largely consistent across devices.
While visually appealing, the app places an undue cognitive tax on its users. A canonical user flow for an application presenting episodic content is seeking the latest episode. The following screens, and annotations, examine the current flow when affronting this scenario:
Home Screen. User goal: watch latest episode.
First Click: previously watched episode. Goal: series screen.
Series screen: previously viewed episode pre-selected. Goal: new episode.
Scroll on Series screen: no new episode present. User fails to achieve goal or additional info.
Drunk with Data
While all the data we now have access to can vastly improve user experience, as well as providing correlation with advertising, associated, and additional content, Empathic UX can better direct the value-added use of that data to drive telemetry design and subsequent data-driven content delivery.
In the CBS All Access app, the first row of content offerings is called “Recently Watched”, with content driven by usage data, but, really, to what end?
The information most likely to be retained—without reinforcement in the UX—is what the user has most recently watched. Viewing history, while easy to collect, is not a primary user goal, but a secondary “confirmation”, in an episodic series context, of where the viewer left off. The primary goal remains the next, or latest, episode. As in the annotations above, this should not be a treasure hunt.
A better use would be presenting the newest episode as the primary link, or presenting when the latest episode will become available, and offering alternatives based on user-habit data collected from prior usage patterns.
Ensnared by History
A holdover from broadcast television assumptions, which would no longer be intuitive to millennial and younger viewers, is using broadcast schedule as a primary navigational principle. The advantage, inherent in the title On-Demand, is that users access programming (even that word is a holdover) in an ad-hoc manner, without resort to anachronistic arbitrary scheduling. Users who no longer connect to traditional scheduling are obliged to do extensive research to just discover when something is scheduled in order to discover when that next episode will be available. Although a broadcast schedule is provided, hidden in the app, user instinct is to use more internet-age intuitive means to determine availability (search engines, Wikipedia, fan sites, etc.) thus, unintentionally encouraging users to leave the site; never a desirable outcome either for user or content provider.
Empathic UX; consciously attempting to place ourselves in the users’ mental state, at each step along their journey, could have avoided most of these damaging assumptions. Empathic UX utilizes all the same methods available to all members of the design community, but places a humanizing, empathetic, lens on their processes. For example, directed brainstorming would, instead of asking, “what would the user do here,” would instead ask, “what is the user feeling here, what do they want?” A seemingly simple variation, with paradigm shifting results.
Finally, while global search is available for users with a clear and specific title in mind, there is no means to search for content thematically, or any additional hinting to compensate for more human associative reasoning.
My personal favorite missed opportunity appears on the search screen. The large promotional images that come up as interstitial content suggestions based upon user input, are non-navigable, non-selectable, and appear to only have the most peripheral relationship to the users’ input. I can only posit that an Empathic UX lens on this page rather than a binary feature-complete? Yes/No lens might have provided more effective results.
