I no longer think it’s okay that my TV is your billboard
About two months ago I freed myself from the clutches from Comcast cable subscription service and have lived with iTunes and Netflix via my Apple TV. As a person who doesn’t watch many sports and reads news online more than I ever watched it on TV I didn’t feel like I was missing anything when I cut the cord. Unfortunately this wasn’t exactly true.
What I was missing wasn’t the thing you’d quite expect like a recent episode of some show or a news event. It was commercials. Let’s be clear — When I say “missing” I mean that literally. I had no nostalgic longing for being force fed ads every 7 minutes or so like traditional television, it was just something that was stitched into everyday television watching I didn’t realize was gone until I decided to add Hulu Plus into my cable-free bliss.
I was excited to add Hulu Plus into my line of services. Ideally, iTunes would be my Pay-Per-View, Netflix would be my a la carte source for TV and support old couch potato habits during weekends of binge-watching, and Hulu Plus would keep me current on latest episodes and almost act like a DVR.
Unfortunately, that DVR came with commercials.
Despite the fact I could finally watch Community, SNL, Family Guy, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and other programs just a day after they aired I was completely put off by Hulu’s ads. For nearly two months the one sanctuary I had from ads was my TV and I hadn’t realized it until Hulu threw them back in my face. It was like I had been sitting in low light and someone just flashed bright lights into my eyes — It literally hurt.
Long story short, at this point of me writing this article it has only been 72 hours since I have had Hulu Plus and I’m already thinking about canceling the service. I miss the zen-like TV watching I had just days ago that was ad free, and I may be willing to sacrifice instant gratification of having the shows I want now in efforts to have a relatively ad-free home.
Ads are everywhere even on two and a half minute video clips on the internet. Think about that for a minute — You now get 15 to 30 second ads on something that’s about 2 to 5 minutes long. Percentage wise that’s a huge waste of time. In a world where we are constantly hit with advertisements as soon as we open an app, a webpage, walk outside, or listen to radio, it was nice to have a sanctuary in the form of my TV.
All in all I think the experience of not being harassed by advertisers via your TV outweighs the ability of watching all of your favorite shows. If you don’t believe me, go about 6 weeks with only Netflix and/or iTunes and come back to ad-saturated television watching and you’ll see what I mean.
Inspired by “Why we canceled Hulu Plus” via Speed of Creativity
Everyday Interactions: Making the Case for Relaxed Usability Tests
Most usability test how-to lists began with, “Make the user feel at ease, explaining to them that this is not a test. Every time I rattle off that preamble, I get the feeling I really come across like this to my testers:
Photo Credit: Daria Wiki
Show me, don’t tell me. Show the tester…
Source: everydayinteractions
Design is about relationships via Build
Rimino - A Human Touch on Mobile Experience
Some interesting ideas in this video:
- Bendable hardware
- Entire back being a camera of some sort being able to recognize text, etc
- Content-aware writing recognition (if you write something that looks like an address the phone recognizes it as such)
- Being able to select a person from your contacts and “tap” them to get their attention
- Having the ability to let the phone “know” you are using the computer and to forward all alerts to it
- Having multiple mobile devices work together and automatically sync together to make a larger screen
Another day made of glass.
I’m tempted to invest in Corning and in 409 glass cleaner.
Dustin Mierau and Dave Morin, co-founders of Path, talk about the new version of the mobile photo app, Path, and how it brings beautiful design while letting users build private journals that let them preserve and share memories in ways other apps don’t.
If you haven’t tried Path and you like social-networks and good design you should try it. It’s basically a mobile-only, Facebook Timeline-ish approach to intimate connections on the go. Personally I think Facebook has the right idea with timeline and it may be the future of social networking, but making that experience more mobile is the path (pun intended) to go on.
Source: designmorsel
The medium is the messenger.
Like Auld Lang Syne, you likely don’t know all of the classic Marshall McLuhan quote. WE PROVIDE IT NOW:
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
When We Build is worth your time as a deconstruction of that premise, especially if you’re a UX/IA fanboy. OR EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT. If you just think for a living then, check out this deep dive into how user experience from a creation standpoint is being altered daily. Stick with it kids, because former Apple interactive designer Wilson Miner’s quiet delivery takes you places, with some twists to longstanding MM conventions, namely > The medium is now a tool by which designers affect change exponentially. (Via.)
Source: adverve
How Expectations Can Turn Anything From Worthless To Priceless
Whether its wine or music, the pleasure we take from an experience has everything to do with expectations, writes psychologist Paul Bloom.
