Thankfully, it’s not just me doing this; there’s a whole team devoted to this task (several, depending on who you ask ). And one of the best ways to stay on top of this tidal wave of new developments is to be able to leverage the collective knowledge of the team, each member contributing their own $.02 on whatever topic of interest, from which, when taken together, one can get a rough sense of where’ the industry is at, and where it’s going. To do this, though, requires a robust, flexible system to manage and categorize this constantly-updated stream of information, and I’ve found that the legacy corporate, Web 0.2 system we currently have in place was just not cutting the mustard. In fact, it was hurting our team, and thus, by extension (IMHO), our business.

So I spent some time poking around the interwebs to see what a viable (hopefully, free) alternative would be. I took a look at several open-source content managements systems - Plone, Drupal, Joomla - and found them to be very powerful, but with a somewhat steep learning curve, and probably overkill for what I needed. I didn’t want to spend weeks just getting up to speed with a system, when I knew, in the back of my mind that there was one tool out there - one dead easy to use, robust, flexible, jack-of-all-trades,  all-around awesome tool that could fulfill about 80% of functionality I was looking for. I’m talking, of course, about of Wordpress.

To make a long story short, after a couple weeks of back and forth with our internal tools and IT teams, a bit of convincing on the part of my manager and others in our organization, I finally have a working Wordpress blog running behind our corporate firewall; it is - albeit slowly - being adopted by my colleagues (a team of about ten), and has, after a trial period, fully replaced our previous blog (which was powered by our massive company-wide dinosaur of a content management system).

I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about some of the challenges I faced and the workarounds I found, for anyone who hopes to do the same:

Convicing People of Worth

Time == money, and with ROI being the acronym on everyone’s lips (well, WTF is on mine sometimes), it’s important to have some good reasons why a blog is worth the investment in time and effort it takes to set one up. Though, seriously, with Wordpress’ famous five-minute installation, unless you’re making serious bank, this can’t take more than a couple dollars of your time! What enabled me to sell others on it was the fact that it could be used not only as a blog but also as a powerful content management system, in which posts can be tagged and categorized, and then later retrieved at the outset of a project. So figuring out what anyone ever said about, say, social media is as easy as clicking on the Social Media category. 

This is, of course, assuming that everyone does a good job of categorizing their posts. But a little work up front can pay off a lot down the road when it comes time to draw on this accumulated corpus of knowledge. On this note, it’s really important to come up a priori with a suitable taxonomy of categories which suit the breadth of topics relevant in your industry.  You can always change them later, but a good starter set is important so that no post gets lost in the mix.

Cost

Wordpress is free, you say (it’s GPL-ed, which doesn’t restrict its commercial use). There is no cost. Well, there are costs, but they’re not immediately obvious. It costs money to run servers, to pay for service contracts, to back up your data. I thought that running a blog would be as easy as plugging a Mac Mini into a port in the wall, but it’s really important to make sure that the server you’re running it on is maintained properly. So while Wordpress itself is technically free, it’s worth plunking down whatever is required to avoid having a server crash and losing months of valuable links and insights.

Barriers to entry

People, much like large corporations, are slow to change behavior, and it is an awful lot to ask of people to change everyday behaviors to accommodate a new technology, especially if the value of that technology is not immediately apparent. One way to mitigate the negative side-effects of technology upgrades  is to make the new system feature-for-feature backwards compatible with the old one, so that no additional work is required to get an equal level of value. Kind of like snapping out the table cloth from off a table without disturbing any of the place settings.

For example, our old blog was really convenient in that you could register for email updates whenever a new entry was posted, and it was also possible to post new entries via email. Wordpress does not come out of the box with a subscribe-via-email feature (I like using one called Subscribe2 ) but, assuming you have a mail server at your disposal, you can set it up — with a little bit of effort — to handle posting via email. I never was able to get this feature up and running, but I found that the Press This posting bookmarklet, which comes out of the box in Wordpress 2.6, makes posting a pretty painless operation, as it integrates right into your browser toolbar.

Even with these backwards-compatible features in place, there was still some attrition when we moved from our old blog to the new one. So the moral of the story is, make it as easy as possible for people to post.

Also, as a corollary, go out of  your way to help your co-workers become familiar with Wordpress! It’s definitely user-friendly software (and fun!) but some features are not immediately obvious on first use.  Helping show people the ropes is an effort that will definitely pay off in the long run; if people are frustrated or confused from the outset, they’ll be even less inclined to get on board.

Security

Security is always an issue in big corporations, and there were definitely a lot of questions as to the security of Wordpress. We’re running the blog behind our corporate firewall, so that definitely helps lock it down some. There are also Wordpress plugins available to help with LDAP authentication if that’s a requirement. We never were quite able to get this plugin to work with our LDAP server, and eventually gave up, but with a bit more work, I think it would be possible.

While by default, anyone can read a blog you’ve set up with Wordpress, in order to be an author, Wordpress requires a user to have a login. There is a setting to allow people to register themselves (and the admin sets the default privileges of self-registered users - i.e. can they publish posts or only contribute content?). What I found well, though, was to manually create a login for everyone I knew I wanted to be able to post to the blog. I felt that by taking this initial step (as opposed to asking people to register themselves), it would make things that much easier for everyone to try out Wordpress.  

One other advantage of  a single person creating a username for everyone at once, is that it affords a consistency that could make certain things easier down the road. For example - Wordpress is flexible in that you can change almost anything about your account except your username. Once you create that username, the only way to change it is to delete your account and create a new one. So, by explicitly choosing a certain username for each of my teammates (specifically the id which is used on the company wide intranet), I have left open the possibility to leverage LDAP authentication when we get that plugin working. If everyone were to create their own username, with no enforced format, there is no guarantee that this username would be compatible with another form of authentication if it became a requirement.

Multiple Blogs

As discussed above, because Wordpress is only nominally ‘free’, there was some question as to whether it was worth the investment if this tool was just meeting the needs of a single (i.e. my) team. In general, I would imagine that corporate IT is looking for solutions that can scale, and is not interested in investing time, effort and money in one-off solutions that just serve a small subset of their serviced population.

Case in point: as I was discussing setting up a Wordpress blog with our tools team, there was another team within my organization who was talking about tweaking and contorting our corporate CMS to fit its needs of a dynamic,  update-able site where they could publish their perspective on design trends. After sitting down and determining what their needs were, I suggested that Wordpress is just the tool for them. As it turns out, it was.

Fortunately, once you have a Wordpress installation and database set up, it is dead-easy to set up additional blogs. We have three running off of the same database. And each one is its own unique identity, fully autonomous and administered by a different person on a different team.

***

This article by Cory Doctorow about the inherent tension between corporate IT and tech-savvy users really struck a chord with me, as it echoed a lot of the feelings I had and challenges I faced while working on this project. I agree with it completely, and think that it is a sad state of things when the users of corporate IT (specifically those who are advocating change) are seen as “heretics”;  they  should be seen as scouts, out there in the trenches scoping out new vantage points and competitive edges.

I think that tools like Wordpress can provide that edge. And this is just one example of an ecosystem of incredibly powerful, free (or cheap) tools out there. Especially when compared with the unusable legacy systems that cost orders of magnitude more money to operate, train and maintain, the benefit of these tools is self-evident, and the potential they have to positively impact practices in the workplace is limitless. Policy may come from the top down, but change has to come from the bottom up.

Well, using the industrial stapler in my office today, I noticed a little nub sticking out of the front of it that I could swear wasn’t there the last time I used it.

Hard to read from this photo, but it says “User Guide” with a little arrow that invites you to pull the nub towards you. I took the nub challenge and pulled…

Now, while you could argue that a stapler shouldn’t need instructions, I’d argue back that there are some operations - de-jamming, re-filling, or calling for tech support (really?!?) which require kinds of specific information that users shouldn’t have to remember - such as the phone number or the model of staple needed.

So this is pretty nifty, I think, and useful for some bits of information which wouldn’t be immediately obvious. I like how it’s there when you need it, and not when you don’t, is very discoverable, but not knowing about its existence does not negatively impact your experience with the stapler (assuming you don’t need to call tech support :) 

Also, I’m sure unintentional on the part of the designer, it has a GUI widget feel to it; I was half-expecting the arrow to rotate 180 degrees once the drawer was pulled out to indicate that it could be pushed back in!

Despite my current gig as a designer, I’ve had an opportunity with DIYcity to reach way back to my computer science B.S. and get my hands dirty with some Java programming, which has been a nice change.

DIYcity’s first project, released a couple of weeks back, was called DIYtraffic. It is a traffic monitoring system  that takes input from Yahoo!’s traffic API, and pumps it out over a Twitter feed (see traffic_chicago’s feed for an example). The cool thing about the system, is that it’s set up to be super-extensible, so the same framework can be appropriated for any city, any traffic feed and any output source (twitter, sms, facebook,etc.) assuming you’re up for writing a bit of code Working on this project, I got a chance to play with the Twitter API (an experience which was at times frustrating, at times awe-inspiring), and also put into practice whichever best practices of object-oriented software programming I remembered (or could learn about with a quick Google search).

Just today, DIYcity has released our second app called SickCity - real time disease tracking. You can check out the live, running version of it up at sickcity.org. Basically, we’re tracking Twitter for the mention of illness terms (such as “feeling ill”, “flu”, “head cold”, “food poisoning”) located within a particular city. Kind of like Google Flu Trends, but more local (city instead of state scale), more extensible (tracking multiple conditions), and more organic (someone may tweet about having a cold but not do a Google Search on it - but of course the opposite holds true as well :). Hey, it’s a start. This app was built primarily by Paul Watson, with design input / support from John, Clint McMahon and myself.

Twitter’s incredible. Kind of like a Google News for people.

One particular sculpture, which I was unfortunately unable to take a photo of (or find online) caught my attention. It was a beautifully intact, almost perfect condition. Roman in origin, the sculpture portrayed Dionysus, the god of wine (and certified party animal) posing with Pan, his little half-goat half-human freaky friend. According to the caption below, Pan was gazing adoringly at Dionysus, but I think it was more lust than love.

But what really struck me about the sculpture is described in the last paragraph:

The sculpture is remarkably intact. Complex pairs rarely survive two thousand years in such complete condition. The artist made careful choices to ensure the figures stability. A tree trunk supports the pair; Pan’s elongated arm is joined to Dionysus’ back; the god’s neck is reinforced by his bound hair, and this hand rests on Pan’s shoulders. Aesthetics, psychology, and engineering combined to create this remarkable work of art.

This is an awesome example of what I see as the intersection of art and design. Granted, I don’t have a formal education in either, but my very vague understanding of the difference between the two is that, while art creates beautiful things, design creates beautiful (possibly functional) things that can be reproduced on some appreciable scale. Art is created in a world of boundless possibility, while good design is forged under the pressure of constraints.

So this sculpture (ack I wish I had a picture of it ) is a great example of what can happen when an artist - a sculptor, in this case - takes into consideration particular constraints, let’s say longevity or robustness.

Would the sculpture have been more beautiful if the figures were prancing through a forest of small saplings as opposed to leaning against a single large trunk chosen by the artist? Perhaps. Would it be more moving if Pan’s “elongated arm” were outstretched,  frozen in some grand gesticulation in homage to Dionysus? Perhaps. But these decisions were made (in retrospect, for the better) and this work of art is no less stunning because of any sacrifices which may have been made.

Whether the particular constraints of longevity and robustness was imposed by the commissioner of this sculpture, or is due solely to the foresight of the artist, we can not know. But whatever the case, this sculpture, clearly built with a set of constraints in mind, has survived in almost perfect condition after two millennia! Have you ever owned a product that lasted that long ?

Walking into Chicago Public Library after work to pick up a book (I had no idea that you could get these things anywhere other than Amazon!), I saw a sign which said something to the effect of “The library auditorium will be open as of 10 a.m. for people to gather and watch the presidential inauguration.”

That’s neat, I thought. I would have liked to have been there.

You see, I watched the inauguration while I was at work. My co-workers were gathered in the break room watching a grainy tv broadcast. I was at my desk, watching a live, high-quality video feed from CNN augmented by a stream of mostly tacky or trite, but occasionally funny,  comments from the Facebook peanut gallery. (Great partnership, by the way; first time I actually saw the value in that social networking service.)

Fitting, perhaps, at the dawn of this new administration, in these times of purported Change, to be watching an event a thousand miles away, in real time, ‘accompanied’ by all of my ‘friends,’ who are scattered throughout the country, and indeed the world.  Does this ability of shifting time and place not represent the peak of technological achievement?

Well, yes it does …. I guess. The confluence of technologies such as the internet, streaming digital video and social networking have indeed given us the power to partially transcend the constraints of time and space, consuming information and communicating with people at our own convenience, regardless of the temporal and spatial gaps which divide us.

But to chalk this all up as an absolute and unqualified positive is conveniently (if not naively) leaving something out of the picture. Upon reading that sign on the door of the Chicago Public Library, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret. Regret that technology enabled me to behold this event in such a personalized manner. Regret that I wasn’t there to witness this historic occasion in that auditorium filled with complete strangers, all bound together by nothing other than the fact that they all happen to reside in the same city. There’s something magical in that — the kind of magic that can’t be captured in a use case or a experience definition document.

Among the many wondrous things achieved by technology, the lowest common denominator may be that it makes our lives more convenient. Technologies like telephony or video-conferencing allow us to shift place, and talk to someone who’d never otherwise be able to see us or hear our voice. Recording technologies help us shift time, committing audio, video or some combination of the two to an archive which can be subsequently played back at will, regardless of whether it was recorded one minute or one hundred years prior. I’d argue that mobile technologies have facilitated something I call decision-shifting; no longer must we commit any appreciable amount ahead of time physically meeting at a particular time our place when we are but a text message or short phone call away from a last-minute change of plans.

So what’s the harm in all this ?

Perhaps this is too grave a word to use for what can be considered a somewhat frivolous concern. But what other term can be used to describe how technology like the microwave has impacted the tradition associated with a proper sit-down family dinner, how TiVo has affected the ceremony surrounding the weekly viewing of a favorite TV show among friends, or how email has all but taken every last bit of romance out of written correspondence.

I don’t say these things as a hater; I am a user and proponent of these technologies, and it is indeed my livelihood to further advance technology to better suit the needs of those who utilize it. But as a professional trained in human-computer interaction, I nevertheless think it is important to recognize how they impact us, on both an individual and a societal level. I don’t plan on halting my use of these time- and place-shifting technologies because of the barely audible din of social fabric slowly ripping apart, but  events like the one I’ve described here do give me pause, and a chance evaluate how my notions of sanctity have changed as a result of living in a whenever, wherever society.

**************************************************

Note: Apologies, reader, if, based on the title, you thought this article would be about something more exciting, like intergalactic travel or time-porting. Actally, I don’t even know what time-porting is, so you’re s.o.l. there.  Don’t ever check this blog for posts about time-porting, in fact, because it will likely just be a bunch of gibberish.

I guess that the shapes in the Obama logo are generic enough that it could be interpreted in any number of ways  - an american flag? sunrise over a field?  a five-lane highway to change? - but I still think there’s something there. Or maybe it’s just because … I want to believe. (Isn’t that the power of good visual design?)

There’s a lot of great commentary and interpretation out there on the Obama logo. I especially like the visual-design-centric analysis in this article on the graphic design site UnderConsideration. It does a great job of illustrating how flexible the logo is, and how it has been adopted for many different niche demographics, such as this spin which  is intended to engage first Americans:

Beautiful, subtle design. I must admit that I’ve never heard that term before. Is that the currently accepted one?

Check out this one:

Kids are so bad at drawing circles! And they love unicorns. So do I, as a matter of fact. I wish there was a Unicorns for Obama campaign - I think they’d totally vote for him.

Actually, I think that kids find the term “kids” insulting; they prefer to be called Developing Americans.

From their site:

Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them

Wow - What a mandate! Re-inventing your city (Chicago, in my case) … hell yeah, count me in! I was really excited to find that a DIYChicago group had already been created.

In retrospect, it seems so obvious, no? People getting together using their pooled skills and creativity for the collective good.  Kind of like saving the world, but on a much more manageable scale. In fact, I think that the city is the perfect scale for this kind of endeavor. Not too large as to make any effort moot, but also large enough to actually make a difference on a local, national, and perhaps even international scale.

One of the things I was unexpectedly surprised with about Chicago when I moved was how progressive it was - there seems to be a pervasive undercurrent here around eating local, using less or greener energy, and giving back via community service. DIYCity promises a community of progress-minded individuals aiming to solve these problems (and others) using any combination of freely-available technologies which already play some role in our daily lives. I’m eager to see how Chicago’s creative community (which seems to be huge!) - and the loosely coupled sectors of art, design and technology - will converge to confront the issues that confront this beautiful city, this hog-butcher of the world, this city of big shoulders, this … oh? Ok, right. I’ll stop now.

As  a designer, I (not-so) secretly fantasize about saving the world, or at least making it a better place to live. I think about the almost-elemental power of design and the capacity is has to solve countless problems. And then I think about the problems that I solve on a daily basis: How many thumbnail images can I fit in this area? How can I make this marketable?  How can I ensure that you don’t have to touch the screen too many times to accomplish task a? Or log in twice?

Not that these aren’t interesting problems - some of them are quite challenging. It’s just a matter of context. If the ultimate goal of all this expended brainpower is to ensure that someone can watch YouTubes anytime, and has access to all their friends, all their email and all their photos from anywhere, then, even when put in only a modicum of perspective, doesn’t it all seem at best, just a little bit frivolous?

I hope that DIYCity will provide a forum for applying design thinking to problems for which the solutions stand not only to make people’s lives more convenient, but genuinely better.

Well, tonight, as a cosied up my laptop to stream the movie “The Orphanage,” I realized that a high-quality video is sometimes, not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity! Streaming at 500Kbps, the subtitles on this foreign film bore more of a likeness to bloody 8-Bit Super Marios that had been shitbeat by Koopa Troopers than Roman characters.  Well, I guess it serves me right for trying to watch a foreign film instead of just watching the whatever the latest episode of 30 Rock is over and over again.

So I decided to consult the interwebs on this issue. Sure enough, with the help of The Google, and this post on a site called Hacking Netflix, I found out a way. It’s actually pretty simple! While in the streaming Netflix player in Internet Explorer, click anywhere in the black surrounding the film, and then press Shift-B. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, you’ll see a pop-up menu with a set of available bit-rates. Choose at your discretion though — you’re disobeying the Netflix monkey behind the scenes who’s dilligently calculating the optimal stream rate for your connection.

So what if  I could have watched the 500Kbps version in the amount of time I now have to wait for the 1600 Kbps version to queue up

Huzzah for sticking it to the Netflix man!

Feedback is important. Whether in the context of personal relationships, professional careers, or user interface design, it’s important for people to know how they’re doing and what’s going on in some one else’s head (or on some server). In fact, I can think of very few situations where more feedback would be a bad thing. But two pop immediately to mind:

1. Complex surgical techniques - I’d rather be knocked out and spared the detail of every artery being clipped or slice being made
2. Piloting an aircraft - It should be placating, but it always just annoys me more when the pilot tells me what the “folks in the tower” tell him.

But in the world of streaming video, feedback is definitely a good thing. There’s nothing worse than catching only every other choppy word of your favorite Fall Out Boy music video, or having your screen freeze up on you as some ancient truth is to be revealed on the season finale of Lost. Streaming video services have adopted differing mechanisms to inform the user about status information which affects the video watching experience. I’ll look at three of them (Hulu, Netflix and YouTube) here, and discuss which features are helpful, which are frustrating, and which make me wish that i’d stop being such a cheapskate and just get cable and hook up my damned television already so I don’t have to watch all my tv through the web

Hulu

The Hulu video streaming user interface is nice and simple. It’s got a play/pause button. The time elapsed and total time of the video are shown, and the current location in the video is handled visually by a lightly shaded bar filling up the timeline. Mousing over the timeline will show you what the timecode of that location is, and a click will then skip to that timecode (this is how seeking is handled, no fast forward or rewind buttons). Note the three white dots - they represent commercials - which are mandatory to watch. So, if I try to be sneaky and skip past one of the dots, then before starting playback at my requested location, it will stream any commercials I’ve skipped over.

This screenshot shows what the interface looks like while the video is playing:

Note that the timeline doesn’t actually give any indication of how much video has been stored up in memory; the only information you see is where the video is currently playing. When your network connection slows or you otherwise run out of buffered video, the video just starts choking, pausing and playing as more bandwidth becomes available, without giving any visual indicator to the user as to what’s going on and how to solve it. You could always pause the video:

This screenshot shows what the video looks like in the paused state. Notice the icon that shows up on screenwhich indicates how much video has been buffered. In theory, this is a great feature, but in practice it ends up being very useful as the qualititative display gives no actual information as to the worth of each of those bars. Is each bar worth a a couple of seconds of video? A minute? When will it be ’safe’ to play? What does it mean when the buffer is full? The user interface does not provide the answer to any of these questions. Also, I kind of cringe at the use of the term Buffer, as it’s kind of a techy term.  Users aren’t idiots and I’m sure everyone knows what a buffer actually is, but it just seems like the kind of word that should appear in the code, not in the UI.

YouTube

Most people are probably pretty familiar with the YouTube interface (whether they’re conscious of it or not) so I won’t go into much detail about the user interface, other than to say that it’s actually quite similar to Hulu’s:

Play/pause button, click to seek.  The one feature in which the YouTube interface excels is that, unlike Hulu, it seems to buffer video by default, and not only when you have it paused. Also, this information is displayed clearly and unambiguously to the user in the form of a ghosted bar filling up the timeline as video is downloaded and buffered.

Note that this buffering-ahead happens both while the video is playing (above), and also while it is paused:

This affords a really nice use case of just putting the player on pause when your internet connection slows and waiting until the red bar has filled in substantially before resuming playback.

The one thing that’s really nifty about this visualization is that it it overlays three important pieces of information -how long the video is, where I currently am in the video, and how much future video has been downloaded - into one place and references them all in the same terms. Contrast this with Hulu’s representation of a buffer occupying a completel seperate and logically dislocated part of the screen from the timeline of the video progress.

Now - Hulu may actually be buffering video ahead while it is playing, but because it doesn’t give me any indicator of this (and seems to freeze up a lot more often than YouTube ), I have no reason to believe that it is looking out for me like YouTube does.

Similar to Hulu, but without the commercial interruptions, you can click anywhere in the timeline to seek and start playing from that point. If the video for that part has not yet been downloaded, it will start buffering from there:

Finally, one last feature that is small but nice, and missing from Hulu, is the little icon that appears on the video to represent “I’ve run out of buffered video to play for you, but I’m working on it!” As a user, this shows me that the system realizes what has happened here, and is working hard to remedy the situation. In Hulu, when you run out of [invisible] buffered video, the playback just chokes. No courtesy indicator, nothing. Just Jack Donaghy frozen in midsentence, about to say something incredibly funny which will undoubtedly end up humiliating Liz Lemon in some subtle yet effective way.

Netflix

Of the three services I’ve covered in this post, Netflix is the only one that is paid, and I think that the robustness and intelligence of their video player reflects this premium.

First of, it does a series of checks  before even starting playback to determine, among other things, at what quality to play your video:

I have no idea what it’s doing or how it’s working, but it’s using language I can understand (i.e. no talk of buffers and whatnot) and I get the overwhelming sense that this Netflix player knows what its doing and is going through a lot of trouble to ensure a good playback experience for me.

But it gets even better! Because it’s checked my internet connection, it can predict how much it must pre-buffer so that my video playback doesn’t run out and get choked up. And it communicates this to me in clear terms, and even tells me how long I’ll have to wait until everything is sorted out:

I really like the fact that Netflix quanitifies this wait time for me. I can decide now whether I want to go make some popcorn, check the news, or use the bathroom!

The only complaint that I really have with the Netflix client is around this initial check. If it deems that you have a slow connection then it decides that it will give you a low quality feed, and there is no feedback as to what quality this feed is or a choice to bump up to a higher-quality feed - say, after you close down network-hogging applications or shut off other computers which may be using some bandwidth. While I appreciate the fact that the player makes a lot of complex decisions on my behalf, it’s also rather annoying to be locked into a low-quality (almost un-watchable) feed when I’d much rather be given the choice to wait for a higher-quality feed to start buffering up.

The real forte of the Netflix video playback client is its ability to make bandwidth calculations (on the backend) and the thoughtfulness with which it keeps the user informed (on the front end) of what’s gone wrong and how long he or she will have to wait until it’s righted. There’s lots of examples within the Netflix player of these kinds of super-informative messages which provide multiple modes of representation of it’s current state:

If your bandwidth drops suddenly and throws off Netflix’s initial calculation of how much video needs to be pre-buffered to ensure a seamless watching experience, the above dialog is displayed. This shows the amount buffered both as a visual representation and as a percentage done, and also shows the estimated start time as a numerical value (time) which actually has some worth in human terms!

And like YouTube, Netflix will buffer ahead when the video is paused, though the representation is somewhat subtle:

Theoretically, if they did their calculations properly in the first part , then this extra buffering is somewhat superfluous, but it comes for free and is a good feature to have in case of unexpected bandwidth fluctuations.

Conclusion

Of the three playback interfaces, I think that Netflix is by far the most informative, the most flexible, and handles best in a variety of network conditions. I guess you get what you pay for . 

Here are the features that make a video streaming user interface great:

Buffer ahead - the system should always be trying to buffer more video, whether the video is currently playing or in a paused state. The paused buffer-ahead feature makes it easy for the user to adjust to poor network conditions.

Make state visible - if the system is buffering ahead, make sure that this is visible to the user. The buffering information should use the same visual representation as the timeline.  Also, it is important for the system to indicate when it is working so the user doesn’t feel left in the dust when the video freezes up. This translates to a kind of empathy for the user and tells them ”i know things are f-ed up right now, user, and i’m trying to fix it”.

Show actionable information  - it is important that the information displayed to the user is understandable and actionable. e.g. the system could display the amount of time left in the buffer as a shade of color from blue to green but this is meaningless to the user. When this information is put into minutes and seconds, the user can decide whether there’s enough time to get a snack, leave the room, etc.

Use relevant terms - use words and phrases a user will understand, and state any information in a manner that is relative to video-watching. The benefits of using relevant terms goes beyond just understandability; it can actually create a sense that the system is looking out for and taking care of the user throughout the experience.