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The user interface ( or "UI" for short) of most streaming apps is terrible, with very few exceptions. Back when the streaming industry was a novelty, or just an occasional way we ingested content, it was acceptable to cut these companies some slack — they were new and we were patient.
But for a huge number of people, streaming has replaced all other forms of television entertainment, and it has matured to the point where we shouldn’t have to put up with varying levels of awful. The only platform I’ve used that doesn’t have a bad interface is YouTube TV, (and it has an entirely different problem). But just about every platform has an annoyance, I’m sick of it, and you should be too.
User interface and a lack of information
While classic cable television could get away with this, I feel strongly that a platform that requires users to select something to watch should do a better job of presenting the information. No app that I have used, YouTube TV included, appears to want to give users any idea of what they are watching before they start watching it.
Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Discovery+, Disney+, Crunchyroll, you name it, all of them put an extreme emphasis on showing pretty thumbnails over letting you know what a show is about. Crunchyroll even recently underwent a redesign that made the app look nicer at the cost of information and usability, which I found to be a truly baffling decision.
Streaming platforms seem to think we are a bunch of children and they are a candy store. Therefore, they seem to think it’s most important for them to show as many bright, pretty, shiny buttons as possible so that we feel overwhelmed by the visual ecstasy.
While I appreciate that these companies are trying to show viewers as much as they can on one screen, tailoring that experience to also tell me more about shows I might be interested in would be very helpful.
For example, any streaming platform could certainly show me a thumbnail, but if I choose to hover on a show, maybe open a larger dialogue box so that I can learn more about it? Hulu is the worst offender here. Not only is its app painfully difficult to search through, but the platform also dedicates three-quarters of an entire screen to a still frame thumbnail behind a colored hue filter in what I can only call an egregious waste of space. Netflix is the best when it comes to providing a bit of information about a show, but it does so in the most annoying way possible – more on that below.
User interfaces are often annoying, inconsistent, or broken
Every streaming platform's user interface has something that could be fixed. I consider the two major offenses here to be inconsistencies and annoying “features,” but some platforms are straight-up broken.
Let’s start with annoying since Netflix is the worst offender. While the platform does a good job of providing more information about a show before it is played without requiring a click, it also will autoplay trailers or scenes from that show in order to provide that information. While I am sure there are people out there who like Netflix’s autoplay feature – and for what it’s worth, HBO Max also does this on some platforms but at least has the decency to mute itself – I don’t know anyone who falls into that category. I find that I try to avoid the autoplay by skipping ahead before it can kick in, it’s that annoying. That kind of defeats the additional information that it is trying to provide me.
In Netflix’s defense, the company did provide a way to turn off autoplay last year, though not everyone may be aware of this capability.
Almost every streaming service annoys me with how little emphasis it puts on the content I’ve told it I want to watch. While many services do this to some degree, Disney+, Discovery+, and HBO Max stand out. I am constantly annoyed at how often I need to scroll down or around the app in order to find the shows I’ve told the apps I want to watch. Discovery+ doesn’t even tell me when there are new episodes of shows that I have added to a Watchlist.
Most of the main issues with streaming fall into this category. Whether it is inconsistency across devices, commands within the app, or what is available to stream, it’s a constant mess in the streaming world.
Discovery+ and Disney+ have a problem with content. I don’t know if it’s due to outstanding contracts or poor planning, but both consistently fail to add content that airs on broadcast television to their libraries. Discovery+ advertised itself as offering same-day streaming or even access up to a week in advance of airing on broadcast television, and while this is true for some shows, it isn’t true for all. The most recent season of Best Baker in America, for example, never became available on Discovery+ despite availability on the Food Network app. As a subscriber, this was hugely annoying, and it’s not the only show where this happens.
Disney+ has the same problem. While past seasons of Gordon Ramsay Uncharted were available, episodes from Season 3 were not available until after the season concluded its broadcast schedule.
Part of, if not entirely, the reason to switch to streaming is to choose to pay a monthly fee to avoid commercials and watch shows at your leisure. These two options fail to deliver this experience consistently, if at all.
HBO Max is woefully inconsistent not in what is available, but in the user experience across devices. While the company has been fixing some of its platforms, Roku users have been hung out to dry. Sometimes when I log in, the app shows me my Watchlist. More often, it does not and does not give me a way to navigate to it. The entire reason to have a watchlist is to make it easier to jump to the shows I want to see, and HBO does not allow me to have that experience consistently.
Funimation has an inconsistent experience in its iPad app. Sometimes the entire screen will scroll through episodes while other times only a single line will scroll. It’s bothersome, albeit not experience breaking, but no streaming service gets a pass here.
There aren’t many apps that are truly broken, but they do exist. HBO Max’s problems on Roku don’t just end with its inability to consistently show me the same interface when I log in, but continue into an experience that is at best buggy and at worst completely unusable. I’ve experienced multiple app crashes and other times when it refused to play any content. The app is so slow that it sometimes doesn’t log any navigation commands. Overall, it’s a dice roll if I’m going to be able to watch anything. It’s not just slow on Roku, either. I’ve also experienced slow performance through my browser, and sometimes it will even get so bad that I can hear my computer fan kick into high gear as the service hitches on the login screen.
Crunchyroll is without a doubt the worst, and it got so bad I canceled my subscription. I experienced regular load problems where the app hung up on itself trying to load a selection before fully crashing, user-interface glitches that would send the cursor flying around the screen, constant connectivity errors, and at one point it logged me out and refused to allow me to log back in. From top to bottom, it was a broken experience.
We’re stuck, and they know it
The problem here is that I’m not going back to cable and you’re probably not either. Because of that, we're resigned to gritting our teeth and dealing with these lackluster user interfaces until these streaming providers decide it’s worth it to do something about it. I think all these streaming services know this, which is why we haven’t seen Hulu or Netflix make any changes to their platforms in years – neither has to. We’re going to keep using them anyway, and that sucks.