Of course, there is still room for improvement. Here are some suggestions.
1. Improving “Filter” and “Sort” features
The “Filter” and “Sort” features are a nice thought. Especially when you are looking to find a good movie from 2897 results. There are some quirks to the “Filter” and “Sort” features that could use attention.
* Once a user start scrolling down, the user has to make a decision to “Page Up”, basically losing their place in the scrolling process and restart the downward scroll experience from scratch, in order to set “Filter” or “Sort” parameters. It would be more ideal if the user were to scroll to the far right or left that they would be able to get to the “Filter” or “Sort” pull-down menus without losing their place in the downward scroll.
* A bigger issue with the “Filter” feature is that the options to“Filter” are odd. I was expecting to be able to sort by “CHANNEL (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz)”, “GENRE (Action, Comedy, Thriller, Drama)” or other such criteria. Instead, the below screenshot is what is given. I can’t understand when these filter parameters would be useful.
2. Where am I?
From Figure 1 above, you see that their are 2897 results. As the user scrolls down, the system does not give you any guidance in where the user is. Am I at results 515 or 297? No idea.
A simple counter showing result 297/2897 as the user scrolls would be helpful.
3. Scroll more than 5
When you click BOTH the down arrow key or the Page Down key, guess how many results you move? Yup, 5 for both!
Customers can handle more than 5 content results at one time. In fact, if you look at Figure 1 above, you can see 10 results. Since the bottom half of the second level is slightly cropped, Page Down still only takes you down one level (5 results). Argghhh!
I would much rather see slightly smaller preview images with two full rows of 6 showing, so that I could Page Down to the next 12 results. This would make the browsing more than 2X faster than the current system. The user would be able to arrow down to get to the second row within the 12 results showing.
4. Favorite option is cool. Don’t hide it.
When I was putting together this suggestion list, one of my top suggestions was to provide a bookmark/favorite option. As I played around with the software, I realized that a “favorite” option exists now.
The reason I did not realize this is that the “favorite” option is hidden. The user has to use the right scroll arrow (see Figure 2) to access the “favorite” and “mark watched” options.
I suggest having two lines of program options (Figure 3 mock-up) so that these cool features can be more obvious.
5. Warn me when I “exit”
From the program detail page, there are 2 ways to exit the screen. If you click the “Exit” screen, the user is taken all the way out of the On-Demand feature. Ok, that makes sense, but I can’t tell you how many times when I am scrolling for a movie, that I have to start over because I hit the “Exit” instead of the “Last” (back) button. The “Last” button is what I mean to do, but the “Exit” naming convention makes it sound more like a “back” option that “Last”.
Although there are trade-offs, it might be interesting to experiment with a warning page that asks the user:
- exit On-Demand feature (default), or
- return to the last page (back/last button behavior),
when they click the “exit” button while in the On-Demand feature (at least not at the top level of the on-demand UI).
6. Don’t make us choose between “voice” and “search”
We have two different Comcast remotes. One with the “voice” command button and one with the “search” option button. I love the “search” feature far more than the “voice” search option. Why do we have to have an either or choice? Can’t a remote have support both the voice command and the quick search feature?
7. Responsiveness going backwards
The major downside of the new Comcast software is that is far slower and less responsive than our previous software interface. This is the biggest issue with the new UX/UI.
Thank you for the consideration.
