Convergence in My Living Room

Not too unrelated to yesterday's post on multiple screens is convergence in the living room. Internet on TV-attached devices. And not just the web browser in your Wii. This has been coming for a while, and like a lot of when-will-it-get-here technologies arrived, oh, some time ago. I've had Netflix in the living room for a year, and of course then there's that Wii browser. And what about all the networked gaming that's been going on for years and years. This post is driven by two things that happened to me lately, playing with a Sony Google TV, and getting a new DVD player. The Google TV was... disappointing. And I saw it while shopping for a new DVD player because my previous, marginally-connected one died, and Best Buy decided to screw me on the warranty. So a few days later, a new cool one arrived in the mail. It was not just rather more connected (no browser, but lots of other neat stuff) but the services (apps, if you want) were all significantly better and easier to get to than the Google product. All this basically for free, instead of the premium (or all new box) for Google TV in your TV. So, here's a 10 minute walkthrough of the best and worst connected services and some interesting interactions patterns, or anti-patterns. Coupled with lots of chatter (with some of the phrasing I remember from information superhighway days) this has been on my mind. We're supposed to be seeing convergence in all sorts of devices, in all sorts of areas, and with some new products, and people like Netflix moving into into everything they can get into, the living room is the current frontier. So, like I said, it's here. It's not all good. And not just because of the bad bits of the connectedness above, but because of fragmentation in the worst way. The PVR/DVR does some stuff. The DVD player does other stuff. The game station does some other stuff. The TV will soon do stuff. Annoyingly, much of this is the same stuff, and you have to choose which version of Netflix you might want to use today. Not to mention that consumer electronics and home A/V systems are terrible things to set up anyway.

My programmable smartypants remote is the only thing that makes a lot of the functionality tolerable. But that also took far too much time, and almost no one else I show any of this to, from calibrating my 7.1 surround sound, to getting that remote programmed, is willing to put up with the fuss. There are lots of marginally good-enough solutions, and as the always quotable Russell Davies said the other day "It turns out that homes are mostly full of solved problems. " Most people will keep living with the easiest, quickest solution. And they might well just keep going to their computer or mobile. Unless this gets a lot better, it's not going to get any market traction. Except incidentally. Cameras in phones became default well before they were demanded. Don't get confused by just counting the number of Netflix-enabled devices in homes; look at how many people actually use these devices. Oh, and since I've been writing up lots of design patterns, I always look at new cool products to get good ideas, and avoid bad ones. I just often can't talk about other things I get to see.

Absolute fear

...I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions.

Probably my favorite quote, of a dozen worth mentioning, from this excellent interview with David Simon on writing and producing The Wire. Which everyone should watch. Just finished disk 1, season 5 off Netflix the other day. Eagerly awaiting the rest, except for the end of the series. :(

Seriously? That's your excuse?

So, if you use Netflix at all, you might have heard about this insane plan to eliminate profiles. They were neat, a way to organize lists, like one for movies, one for series. Or one for each family member. I needed it because Netflix also has a limit of 500 disks per queue, and I am over that limit. So, the other day they announced that these would be eliminated. Completely. With no migration. They just disappear in two months. Check out this particular reason, though. Yeah, all the usual, but also:

...keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible. Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website. Continuing to maintain the profiles feature for the passionate few who use it (including myself) distracts us from the mission of presenting to all our members the easiest way to find the best titles for them...

Okay, the system was somewhat cumbersome. They assumed each was a person, so you had to have a different email (username) and password, and it did some other odd stuff like the first profile is the account owner, so when signed onto another you cannot get to account details stuff. But they are claiming that this poor design means that the whole function is worthless. What? This is a terrible way to use design to justify product features. How about a redesign? How about labeling and marketing it correctly, so more than 2% of users can find it. BTW, I think that's a pretty good use rate for such a poorly-communicated service. To clarify, I am not totally talking out of my ass here. I have designed a few profile-based account management systems, mostly for much, much larger organizations than Netflix. It's not that hard, and it's extremely a better idea to fix than discard. Oh, and the users who employ such systems in detail are the good customers. For an MRC based industry, it's always true that churn is expensive; why annoy these folks. I for one have been a pleased (evangelistic) customer for over 7 years, yet I am willing to consider other options now. Okay, I did participate in turning off a system once. At Sprint we were required once to give the ability to customize the account management screen. People could close portlets and move them around. I had poor hopes, but we worked as hard as possible to make it easy. And it tested okay, so no design issues to speak of. And... it was used at appallingly low rates. One year post launch, while working the next release, we checked and found about 5,000 people had ever customized it. We had 7-8 million customers at the time, and maybe 3 million regular users of the web account management system. That's (appx) 0.0016%. This we tossed without regret. 2%? We'd have kept it for that use rate.