Confusing Interface

A still from HBO GO’s web interface.

Take a look at the screenshot above. Some of the options presented by the interface make sense. There is a play button — we’ve seen that before. There is an information radial button, which we can assume gives you information about the episode you’re watching (it does). There are buttons that activate subtitles, change the volume, and inform you on the quality of your connection.

But then there are the arrows. What, on first glance, would you assume the arrows do? I took it as an easy way to flip through episodes of a series — finish one episode and hit the arrow to quickly move on to the next. Try clicking on them, and you’ll be surprised when you are instead brought to a seemingly arbitrary title from HBO’s catalogue: the next item in your watchlist.

What is the watchlist you ask? Well, it’s a video playlist that you can populate by hitting the little plus-sign radial button underneath the play button. This list isn’t automatically updated — you have to manually select each episode you want to add. There is no easy way to move from one episode to the next, and the obvious choice provided by the interface (the two large arrows that always buttress the video) does not fulfill the task the user expects it to.

And, as a side note — there is absolutely no reason the fullscreen button should placed above the playhead. I’ve accidentally skipped to the end of a video too many times. Why can’t it be next to, or below the end of the playhead, like any other video player in existence? Placing it above the playhead makes the user more prone to error — move too high and you pause the video, move too low and you skip to the end. With the fullscreen button placed on the side or below the playhead, this error is eliminated; the user can always aim low, since there is nothing below the video player that effects the playback of the video.