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- Infinite scroll loses its place
- Navigating to detail reorders / alters the index
- Streaming service buries “continue watching”
- UI has no “back” affordance / breaks the back button
- Recommender system has no way of recovering past recommendations
- No way to limit search to “things I previously viewed”

→ “Where the *&$% is the thing I was JUST looking at?!??” is a UX disease running rampant in modern software.

(Re this from @schwa: mastodon.social/@schwa/1120294)

MastodonJonathan Wight (@schwa@mastodon.social)Open Apple News. See a headline that looks interesting. Go tap it. Entire front page replaced by a progress indicator before you even get a chance to tap and everything gets replaced with new stories. How to fuck up the core functionality of your app.

I don’t understand why streaming services don’t plant at least some compact form of “Continue watching” in a consistent, dedicated spot at the top of the home screen.

ME: I will open the Netflulumax+ app because I want to watch the 17th episode of the thing whose first 16 I’ve spent the week binging

NETFLULUMAX+: What could you •possibly• want to watch??? Content discovery is so hard!! Here are 5000 personalized recommendations for you to scroll through! We are smart! We even called it AI!

@inthehands it’s the same reason department stores are hard to navigate. Your goal entering may be to purchase / watch a particular item, but their goal is to show you as much of the other stuff they have on offer as possible. So when you’re done watching the thing you wanted to watch you think “ok but I’ve also been meaning to check out this other thing”

@aubilenon
I am sure this must be the reason, but I have doubts about whether the frustration factor of working through this gauntlet is actually paying off for them. At least as often, it ends up having a Clippy effect: “There’s that stupid-looking show that’s been throwing itself in my face all the way through that other show I like.”

@inthehands well I will say that it’s pretty easy for them to do rigorous a/b testing here so I bet even if it doesn’t work well on you it probably is actually paying off at least in the short term. Long term I think that helped set brick and mortar stores up to be replaced by Amazon.

@aubilenon @inthehands

Yeah, sometimes these things show you who the actual customer is, and often it's not you (or me).

Paul Cantrell

@codefolio @aubilenon
I’ve seen enough of the inside of orgs, and enough of A/B testing, to know how shortsighted both can be; I do suspect that at least to some extent these companies are peeing their own pants to stay warm here. But I grudgingly admit you’re probably both quite correct about this.

@inthehands @codefolio @aubilenon it might be correct for a small margin of users. Companies love doing things that increase metrics for a small number of users, even if those things make the service much worse for everyone else.