Justin Kan, the founder of justin.tv, is a pioneer of live mobile video broadcasting on the Internet.
A walking advert for the possibilities of live mobile video, the justin.tv viewer is given access to a live video stream of Justin’s life 24 hours a day. Other justin.tv channels offer streams from a diverse range of people, some stream mobile video, some don’t, and few match the uptime of Justin Kan’s own stream. However the emphasis is on live video, and this emphasis defines a new niche in internet video broadcasting.
However, despite Justin’s valiant self-publicising efforts justin.tv’s first mover advantage is rapidly being eroded, and may already have disappeared with slick competitors like Ustream and Operator11 offering lifecasters similar features. The race to critical mass, with the prize being a sustainable business in this new niche space has now began.
In any closely fought race however it only takes one trip to leave a gap that can never be closed, and justin.tv is tripping over its own feet, while it’s competitors are not putting a foot wrong.
Slow to add features, and unresponsive to bug reports, justin.tv has done little to improve the usability of its web site in the last two months. But then, today, a new web site design was rolled out. During my morning coffee I logged into justin.tv to check out the archives of the prior evening’s east coast events and was surprised to see a redesign had taken place.
Surprised because there was no substantial advance communication of a major user interface change on Justin’s blog. Yes there is a post about the new design, made at 11.45pm and I understand from fellow chat room users the design was changed shortly thereafter. A few hours notice of deployment of a major redesign just smacks of a lack of advance planning. And when the blog post announcing the redesign is made, and the deployment of the design, occurs while you are asleep it is no notice at all. (N.B. I’m on London time).
What’s worse is that the redesign, while adding some features, and tweaking others, actually decreases the usability of the web site, and what’s more, it’s not pretty. And yes, pretty counts, just ask Apple and other companies that understand that people like beautiful things, and even more so, people like beautiful usable things.
Compare justin.tv to Ustream. Justin.tv is a web site designed by programmers. There is a reason why there is a whole industry based upon the design of web sites, and another whole industry based upon the writing of software. Programmers do not make good web designers.
Here is a list of design and usability issues :-
- The horizontal strip at the top of the page show pictures representing each channel. Unless you mouse over the picture you cannot see the channel name – global navigation must be near perfect which this is not.
- The same strip bleeds off the screen to the right, making you feel like you need to scroll your browser window.
- You embedded a big ugly ‘Live’ button that looks more like an RSS feed button into the already small video screen.
- This same button doesn’t scale well when you view the screen in full screen mode.
- When a stream goes offline, the ‘Live’ button stays on the screen.
- When you browse the archives you can no longer see the chat window. Annoying as a common use case is to chat while watching the archives while waiting for the stream to go live again.
- When browsing the archive you cannot easily see if the channel has gone live.
- When watching the archive video you have a huge button at the bottom of the small screen to open the calendar window – remove all superfluous buttons and watermarks from inside the video window please !
These are my observations, and other people’s from the chatrooms in each channel on justin.tv. It doesn’t matter than only myself and maybe half a dozen other people noted these issues in the time I spent on justin.tv this evening – the fact remains there should have been no issues whatsoever. This is sad given the amount of effort that must have gone into this redesign. Even more sad is that I would gladly have given my time, as would many other justin.tv users, I’m sure, to have beta tested the redesign before it went live.
The issues listed above are design and usability issues that are obvious to actual users of the website (as opposed to developers thinking like users) and could have been spotted and remedied before launch. I won’t even mention the actual bugs. This is another stumble in the race.
To be fair, progress is being made and the new live page is pretty neat. But the rate of progress is not fast enough, which as a user thinks Justin Kan is a gutsy pioneer, and enjoys spending 15-20 hours per week on justin.tv, and wants justin.tv to succeed, is frustrating.
Also worrying is that if the roll out of the new design is indicative of justin.tv’s management and execution abilities they won’t be a finisher in this race. First mover advantage, a bunch of smart and dedicated people, and some VC funding does not guarantee success, execution is also important.
In short, try harder justin.tv.
August 8, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Great post andybob! Although I’ve pointed out some of these things in the past, I don’t know that I’ve said it as succinctly. I look forward to reading future posts and to seeing if we continue to run in parallel — I’d imagine we will. Most users seem to have the same issues, as you’ve pointed out here.