Sunday, August 10, 2008
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I'm digging the http://www.nbcolympics.com site in Silverlight. I can see sports and interviews that I'm interested in and review close plays as much as I like. I've shown this to the wife and the extended family over the weekend.

One thing that really keeping this from being the best thing ever is the user experience. For example, the Control Room is a place where I can select up to four videos to watch at once; one large and three side videos. That's really cool. However, the extended family was the real test; and they were a little frustrated.

The sucky part of the Control Room is the search interface. Here, I'm given a tiny up/down arrow at the bottom of the thumbnail stack. This is something visitors will do many times, every time they visit the site to see the next six or previous six videos in the stack. Why not make this click experience really easy to hit with big, phat arrow overlay icons? Maybe even advertise key strokes that do this. Its just really frustrating for non-technical people to use.

There's too many obfuscated clicks like this in the app. Just a few slight UX improvements would have gone a long way here. NBC Silverlight team, I give you a straight B here. Good job on the insight to give us what we want (choice in viewing Olympic events), but a "meh" job in giving me to the tools to make that choice.

Sunday, August 10, 2008 10:00:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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