Why is Disney+ UX so bad?

Because you can't go anywhere else to see the same content so why spend money on the quality of the software? There's no market competition there so you'll suffer the cheapest product to see their content.

It really, truly just boils down to that. You're not going to switch to Netflix. Or Hulu. Or Apple. Or buy BluRays. Or watch it on YouTube. You can't - they have monopoly. Every dollar they put into the quality of the app is eating into the margin. There's no pressure to increase quality. It needs to just (barely) work so you suffer it enough to watch.

The software engineer can throw out the laziest, fastest turd, the UX designer can do the bare minimum and the product manager can sleep on his job and money will keep coming in.

>I doubt that Disney+'s interface is intuitive to anyone

It is quite intuitive for my 6 year old. She doesn't care about subtitles, or watching episodes out of order, or who the director is. She clicks on some random princess or whatever and boom it works.

Yeah, Disney+ is bad. But have you seen Paramount+? They think Star Trek nerds will put up with anything. As a Star Trek nerd, I found the UI of Transmission to be much better. ;-)

Couple of thoughts. Firstly, you need good product people to be working on these things. You also need people at the company actually using the product. I wonder how many senior Disney execs actually watch on Disney+.

Counter argument: you need time to develop a product and not all features will get the same priority, but things might get there over time. The alternative would be to delay releasing it until it is "perfect".

Do you watch only on Web? Or have you also tried their TV app?

Forget that, I want to know which bright minds at Disney decided to launch Disney+ in a foreign language country (Croatia) without offering dubbed version which they already have for virtually all their content.

You should have seen the search input when it initially launched on the samsung tv app. The alphabet was spread on a single horizontal. So if you wanted Zorro or Zootopia, you're pressing right to get to Z 25 times. They've since updated to the better numberpad-ish style input that netflix/others uses though.

Counterpoint: I never use subtitles, I’ve never had trouble with focus/space bar, I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to search by director… I go to Disney+ I click on a Marvel movie I watch it I’m happy.

So maybe it’s a good enough UX for their user-base?

I have only used Disney+ on a smart TV and Apple TV. It is on par with any other app on these platforms. I have seen several children work it without any instruction.

Perhaps their UX specialists are focused on non-web platforms?

They all are. Netflix's UX is garbage, as is Amazon Prime. And Now TV manages to be even worse than all of the rest put together.

I'm convinced that nobody in any of these companies actually uses their own products.

Apple TV + on the computer is awful as well. Like they woke up brand new with no prior knowledge of how folks use streaming services at all.

And not just in the discovery phase, core play/pause, show me this show’s details page, okay next episode stuff.

Captive audience is a huge part of why they don’t improve, but you’d think some PMs over there would have pride in their work enough to fight for some basic quality of life improvements. Alas.

Ideally streaming companies don't want you (user) to do anything, the less you can the better. Ideally you would click on the Streaming Corp URL or open an app, and then video/music/podcast would start automagically and match your expectation and straming would continue seamlessly forever. While they can't really do this (profitably) yet, they certainly regularly try to get there. That's why there is autoplay everywhere, "smart" lists and playlists, and always on continuous playback.

PS: after some thinking I've realised that I've just described a TV. Yup, that's what they want to give us someday - a Netflix TV, a Disney TV, an Amazon TV, maybe structured into several TV channels because one wouldn't be enough. Call them channels - Netflix Channel 1, then Channel 2 etc. :)

1) D+ is still quite young. Optimizing UIs in this space seems to takes time, going by other development of other services.

2) These are not breaking problems. They are annoying, and for technical people probably more than for casual users. But they are not on a level which will reach major attention.

3) D+ is a streaming-service, so they care more about quality of video. And even there they fail pretty often. For such a big company, it's quite surprising how much they still need to learn.

> but I doubt that Disney+'s interface is intuitive to anyone.

No, it is. On surface, it's a copy of Netflix and Amazon Video, so people have no problem using it, because they know the routine.

Netflix and Amazon Prime are hands-down the worst streaming services I've used, as far as UI. Netflix was good for a couple years but has been going downhill ever since.

The rest are basically interchangeably-mediocre to me. For any of them, if I need to find what's available where, I search elsewhere (justwatch, usually). Search in their actual UI is something I only use to find things I already know exist on the service.

I guess if I had to pick a best one it'd be Hulu, but I also (unlike apparently everyone else?) think HBO's pretty good.

But I only use them on iOS, Android TV (Shield), AppleTV, and Roku. Not on PC, so maybe some of them are really bad there.

People are used to bad software. There are lots of terrible software engineers out there who don't give much thought to user experience, and there are lots of PMs who don't know how to provide a sufficient level of specs. Orgs get big enough that inefficiencies are abundant, and "not my problem" becomes endemic. And then there are the PHBs in non-software-centric orgs who see software as an expense rather than a value center, and so try to cut costs and tighten deadlines.

Even netflix has its share of shitty UX, still, and they've primarily been a technology company from the get-go.

I agree with others regarding the consistency across all streaming services as pretty disparate hard to use user experiences.

That said building for web, iOS, Android, consoles, PCs, macOS and so on means trying to be consistent for your service. Which then leads to issues & challenges, and less consistency with respect to competitors.

I’d be curious to know how often people tend to favor whichever service they used first, and how often people grow tired of services they really like for content but hate for subjectively bad user experience.

I think as a general rule all of the streaming services are spending most of their engineering time/budget on their apps for mobile and TV platforms rather than their websites. Presumably because that's where more people are watching. But also because there's a lot of platforms to cover with apps (iOS, Android, Roku, Tizen, PlayStation, Xbox, etc).

I certainly expect a gradient of quality from the web to the Xbox to iOS (increasing in that order) when I'm choosing which device to watch something on.

My guess: most use Disney+ on their TV or mobile device. Very few use it on the website. The UI/UX is certainly not the best even on those devices but it's good enough (TM).

> - subtitle settings get reset every time I close the website.

I also find this ridiculous and annoying, but... I've found a "solution". Just open a mobile Disney+ app (I've used the iOS one) and set the subtitles/audio language there and this change is persistent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IMHO all the modern "streaming" UIs suck, but the Disney+ is definitely the worst I've experienced.

A different thing but related: why is Spotify's queue a queue and not a deque? Late Google Play Music had a deque, Tidal has a deque. I often create a long queue of songs and then remember to add a few more to the beginning. With Spotify I have to add them to the end and then manually scroll them all the way to the top. Actually that's one of two reasons why I chose Tidal and not Spotify when GPM died (the other one is that they pay more to the artists).

Honestly my least favorite feature of any streaming app is when clicking on a show on the main screen resumes where you left off. It's convenient for sure but being able to restart the episode before it loads the episode and then having to go back to the selection screen is nice.

But hey, at least Disney+ doesn't cause the TV to smoke, shake and fall off the wall if you want to rewind like HBO Max does.

It has some weird annoyances on Apple TV too.

If you resume watching an episode in a series, then want to get back into the episode list for that series i always end up back on the Apple TV Home Screen a couple of times before figuring out the button presses needed.

And slightly unrelated whinge, the old Ducktales isn’t in the kids account, you have to be on an adult account to see it for some weird reason.

Because it just boils down to the content that's available! Also it's a newer app to be fair.

Hulu's UX is way way worse. I can never figure out how to switch episodes for my current show and the "library" shows very few shows at a time, instead they optimized for showing beautiful photos of shows (weird tradeoff)

HBO Max has a nice 'feature' where it shows a ten second timer at the end of the episode and jumps to the next. For some shows, there is a final scene and it exits a little early so you miss the last bit. If you want to catch them all you need to click an x next to the countdown for each episode.

I don’t know about any of those problems, but my biggest gripe is that when I finish an episode it waits until the very end of the credits before letting me click the next episode. I’ve now resorted to going back to the menu and clicking the next episode manually.

And yes, I do have the setting checked to auto play the next episode.

The worst: 3-5minute credits that you can’t skip at the end of each episode. Guess how great this is for a toddler :)

I only watch it on a smart TV, and I’ve had similar problems with HBO Max’s UI. Disney+ is fairly smooth, and comparable to Netlix.

I do agree with your last point, the search option is borderline unusable for anything other than exact titles. Both those services trail behind Netflix significantly when it comes to search.

A broader question is why streaming services UX is so bad, universally?

One obvious example, is trailer auto-play that cannot be disabled, prevalent in nearly every streaming service I can think of.

Streaming services are extremely user-hostile. Best bet is to not use them. Torrents and Usenet are still a thing.

Another one: Starting a new video will result in audio being muted 80 % of the time.

They also stopped adding content from their massive back catalog. I was looking forward to seeing Disney content from the 50s and 60s but someone decided it’s not worth the cost and effort.

The names of shows/movies are so small too, really needs a redesign.

Because nobody watches it on the web. They could ditch the web player altogether and lose ~0 subscribers.

I get the feeling nobody does user testing, so user's goals are not a priority as a result.

Probably because with a price of USD1.5 a month it doesn't have competition

HBO Max is another bad example, such a huge step backwards from HBO Go.

Building good software is hard, even when you an infinite pocket.

Probably "designed" by a software developer.

Because it increases engagement.

It works well on the TV

terrible UX is the norm, its mostly darkpatterns made to extract as much profit from users as possible