No Zytrons In Range

Another in my series of “comments I was going to post to a specific website, but I’m too lazy to make a new account at said website.”

Today I discovered an independently-made television series called Pioneer One based on a tip from the DailyWTF forums. The first episode is on YouTube, although– fair warning– it has awful audio with a continuous buzz throughout the entire episode. They’re funding it using the Kickstarter method, basically asking for donations for each episode, and they’re up to 4 episodes. This whole thing is actually pretty exciting for a number of reasons, but that’s not what I’m writing this blog post about.

Downloading an episode of Pioneer One is a terrible, terrible user experience. Here’s the post I wrote to stick on their comments:

This download experience is awful. Here’s a few problems:

1) End-users don’t know what to do when the video link downloads a .torrent file. You really need to make it clear that bittorrent is required, other than the little tiny banner at the header of the page, and the unreadable grey-on-grey banner on the top right. I’m sure you get kickbacks from them, but it doesn’t help that bittorrent also tries to install spyware… seriously, it’s 2011! So in addition to this site’s bad user experience, you also suffer from Bittorrent’s own bad user experience.

2) Even knowing it’s a bittorrent doesn’t help, since bittorrent downloads on my connection are about 5 times slower than normal downloads. Uploading and downloading at the same time kills my connection. Since you don’t have any normal downloads available, I’m going to have to wait hours for the three episodes I’m downloading. Amazon S3 costs… about as close to nothing as you can get. Please sign up for it and offer alternate downloads from it.

3) End-users don’t know (and shouldn’t care about) the difference between xvid, theora, and matroska. Fuck, I’m a geek, and I don’t even know or care. Just pick the absolute most popular video format (I presume .mp4, everything plays that from Xbox to iTunes to VLC to Zune) and offer the HD or SD download in it. Then add a note saying “if you have trouble playing, use [program you know works]” in case you encounter the one person in the world who doesn’t have a .mp4 playing program.

4) But seriously, just put a Flash movie player on the page. Again, it’s 2011. There are a dozen Flash video sites that will host this for you, and episode 1 is already on YouTube (albeit with awful audio, and unlisted so you can’t search for it.) Instant gratification is good.

I saw the first episode on YouTube. I came here to download the rest, because of the YouTube audio thing. It was way harder than it had to be.

I’m not surprised that any product made by a person who knows what “Theora” is has poor usability; at this point, poor usability is expected from open source fans. What I’m really surprised about is that it applies even when the product is a TV show and not a piece of software.

Usability is important. Seriously. Fix your website.

Quick post this time. An email I sent to the Contact Us link at a company called TownNews.com. I just thought I’d echo it here, since I think the Internet-at-large deserves to know what happens after you do business with these guys.

I was attempting to read a movie review from 2004 using this link:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/life_of_david_gale/articles/1235143/_alan_parker_lures_you_into_the_theater_but_then_you_sit_down_and_all_he_has_waiting_for_you_is_a_whoopee_cushion
only to find a splash page saying that “The Star Democrat is no longer a website affiliate of the Zwire product.”

Following the link on that page to TownNews.com, the first thing that greets me is your motto:

“Our mission: To help newspapers thrive in an online world.”

Does your company feel the best way to implement that mission is to completely break all links to the Star Democrat’s content?

Breaking links is a sin. Don’t do it.

And if you’re a content creator, and you’re about to sign up for TownNews.com… make sure you put something in your contract to prevent them from totally screwing up your Google ranking and advertising revenue after you stop using… whatever service they provide.

(BTW, visit the real Star Democrat site to give these guys some ad impressions that TownNews.com is stealing from them.)

Here is the schedule for the 510 route from Seattle to Everett Station. Notice how there’s supposed to be a 510 bus leaving SODO at 4:10, 4:25, and 4:40. I left work a bit early today, completely off the train schedule, so I figured I’d take the short walk to the bus stop at 4th and Cherry and catch the 510 to go home. Even if the freeways were slow, it would still be quicker than waiting 20 minutes for a train to even leave, right?

Wrong.

See, it turns out, that bus schedule is actually a work of fiction. No bus leaves SODO at 4:10. And none leaves at 4:25. They are phantoms, they exist only in the mind.

I arrived at the bus stop at around 4:10, which is plenty of time to catch the 4:10 route (it’s scheduled to arrive at 4th and Cherry at 4:15.) But the bus didn’t show up. Around 4:20, I figured I’d just wait for the 4:25 bus to show up. But it didn’t show up either.

Finally, and at long last, a 510 bus arrived at 4:45, actually on schedule! Amazing. Of course, since the previous two buses had disappeared into the Twilight Zone, it was completely packed. Sardine-packed.

Just to add to the misery, this happens to be a record-breaking heatwave in the Seattle area. Look, we even have a “stagnant air warning“, whatever that is. The poor bus’ air conditioner was trying to keep up, but it was futile.

Then to add insult to injury, when the bus finally arrived at Everett Station around 5:55, it was directly followed by another 510 bus. (Probably the one that was actually scheduled to leave at 4:40. I wager the one I was in was either the half-hour-late one or the 15-minutes-late one.)

Grr.

Anyway, I wrote a complaint.

The sign at this bus stop says the bus is scheduled for 4:15 and another for 4:30. I arrived at the bus stop at 4:10, but did not see a 510 bus until 4:45.

When the bus finally arrived half an hour late, it was completely packed and very uncomfortable to ride in this hot weather.

When it arrived at Everett Station, another, mostly-empty, 510 bus pulled in directly behind it. I can only guess that this bus was the one that was only 15 minutes late, which was probably only a few seconds behind the half-hour late bus.

I completely understand that traffic issues are beyond your control, but this is the second time that this has happened to me in a short period of time. Is the schedule incorrect, has the 4:15 run been canceled with no notice? If so, both the signs at the stop and the website have the wrong schedule.

If buses are going to be a full half-hour late, I would like some notice of that so I can instead take the train.

Thank you.

Trying to be polite so I actually get a response.

Slashdot has always been a buggy piece of shit, but recently it’s exploded into a buggy metric fuckload of shit. No matter what I do, every Slashdot article looks like this:

(Click image for a closer view)

Seriously. Slashdot is supposed to be full of smart and technical people, and they can’t even get a goddamned website right? How is that image even being shown to me, the end-user? Have they ever heard of the concept of “staging servers?” It’s fucking disgraceful.

It’s not like I’m using the hated Internet Explorer browser, or some experimental web browser from beyond the stars, or that I’ve hacked the shit out of my system, it’s fucking stock Firefox with one fucking add-on.

Oh, and to make it all worse, I have Slashdot set to use the “classic” (read that as: “working”) comments system, not this new piece of shit they’ve been shitting out over the last year. Not that anybody at Slashdot gives a fuck for my preference, since I still get the new version on my user page, and half the templates.

Maintaining this site is somebody’s full-time job. In fact, there are several people who work for Slashdot and only for Slashdot… what the hell do they even do? Think up more creative ways to cram so much fail in such a small space?

Slashdot is the only website I’ve ever seen where the owners/administrators of the site simply don’t fucking care.

They just do not care.

I got to stop posting about Slashdot, it’s kind of pathetic. Not a third as pathetic as Slashdot itself, though.