Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I lost work, because my computer inexplicably froze up on me or forced me to restart because it had some updates to install.It was at a piece of software I explicitly elected to use, though there were other options available. And, perhaps most surprising of all, this piece of software is from Apple, who’s products I generally find enjoyable to use.

I am fucking pissed at iMovie ‘09.

I needed to do some editing of a video I shot for a tutorial. A colleague of mine suggested using a product called Ultra Video Splitter from company called Aone; my e-mail esponse to him was this:

Thanks, Xxxx – I’m probably going to take a shot at it using iMovie – as it’s software I’ve been meaning to learn how to use for quite a while and this would be the perfect opportunity! I’ll let you know what I come up with ……

Dan

It’s true; I’d never used iMovie before, mostly because I never had a reason to have to use it. And here was the perfect opportunity. I’ve had good experience with Apple products in the past, and I didn’t mind investing time in learning a tool that could potentially come in handy in the future. Besides, Apple sh*t is cool, right? Way cooler than some Windows shareware app.

The good part, is that within about half an hour of clicking around, after hovering over buttons to bring up tooltips and countless Apple-Zs, I knew my way around the interface and had a good mental model of how all the parts fit together. Apple tends to be very good at designing simple, learnable interfaces with plenty of scaffolding to enable first-time users like myself to find their way around.

My goal was very simple. To comb through about 45 minutes of video, splice out ~20 interesting clips, and make a separate video file out of each. I went through the video, Favorite-ing about twenty sections and made ‘clips’ out of them to add to my movie. All without looking at a single sentence of an instruction manual. Bravo to me for being so smart, and kudos to Apple for building an application which requires zero instruction for a newbie to get up and running.

But from here, things went downhill. Fast.

First off, I realized that I couldn’t only export one clip at a time.  You’re only able to export the whole movie (i.e. the sum of all the clips plus whatever transitions are in between them). This was kind of confounding, and I spent a bit of time Googling around before resigning myself to a wonky workaround: duplicating my twenty-clip project twenty times, and then deleting all but one clip in each of the projects, so that when I export, I got just one clip in the movie. *Sigh*.

My test case then was to just create one duplicate project with one clip, and to see how the resultant video came out. To my dismay, I found that the video I was exporting was of significantly lower quality than the source. Back to the Google. Without knowing too much about video editing and codecs, from what I read, In concluded that this is is just apparently the way iMovie works, nothing I can do about it.  But I would be taking these video clips and using them in a Camtasia presentation, which would compress them even more, so starting with degraded-quality clips was not an option. Time to check out the other application recommended by my colleague. *Sigh*.

One issue though – I’d spent about three hours going through the video and hand-selecting the bits that I needed, and I didn’t want to have to go through the video again in another program and repeat this laborious process. Surely there must be some way to export the chapters I’ve created or information about the Favorites I’d earmarked? File -> Export? Hello? Share? Where are you, menu item?!? I tried ‘Export to Final Cut XML’ or something and the xml  file which was produced didn’t seem to have units or tags that I could make any sense of. Fair enough – that one was kind of a stretch. But still …. *sigh*.

Looks like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Here was my plan: I was going to take out a piece of paper (there must be some around here somewhere) and some kind of writing instrument, and record onto the paper with the writing instrument, the time, in seconds, that each one of these clips starts and ends. Then, with this presumably inferior recommended software open, I would then take aforementioned piece of paper, read back the numbers, and create a parallel set of clips within the new software, then export these to seperate videos. Simple, right? A pain in the ass, sure, and a waste of time, sure, but what could go wrong?

As it turns out, it’s not that easy to figure out where in the movie each of my twenty clips started and stopped. iMovie does not tell you the location in minutes and seconds of the playhead. Let me repeat that, this time in bold , red letters:

Nowhere in iMovie ‘09 is there any indicator of time. Everything is relative to everything else, but it’s not possible to determine where anything is in absolute terms.

What is the implication of this? The implication of this is that any work done in iMovie ‘09 is essentially locked in iMovie and, other than exporting a video, there is no way to get this information (even in an ‘analog’ fashion), to any other application.  How so … very … Apple!

(if anyone who reads this knows a way to either export marker information or to see an absolute timeline in iMovie ‘09, please tell me and I’ll gladly whimper away with my tail between my legs).

why? Why? WHY? Who thought this was a good idea? Who would object or be inconvenienced by having this information appear in the “Playhead Information” that follows the scrubber? I just don’t get it. It really frustrates me.

But the deeper question is, why do I still really really want to use iMovie as opposed to the other software (which, after a really contrived process, I was able to utilize)? Why do I want so badly to want to like this software, and to want to use it?

So my revelation out of this long, tedious retelling of this event is that Apple is kind of like a selfish, flaky friend. You know the kind I’m talking about – the kind of friend that’s great to be with when you’re actually hanging out with them, but the second you ask for a favor, or suggest an activity that they’re not too keen on, you get shot down, because … c’mon … who’s really in charge here? We all know that Apple is wearing the pants in this relationship.

And I’ll put up with it (I suspect other people will too), with all the abuse, with the selfishness, just for the chance to use the software — even on its own terms. Doesn’t matter if Apple shows up late, or forgets about my birthday, I’ll take what I can get, because, when things are good, they’re really good! And when things don’t go so well, I’m willing to cut him some slack, because man, he is cool … I’m surprised he even wants to hang out with me at all. And when other people try to tell me how he’s kind of a douche, and that I’ve got lots of other good, reliable (albeit less cool) people I could be spending my time with, I’ll defend him, but I won’t be able to explain why. You could call it “Cupertino Syndrome.”

On the one hand, this experience was incredibly infuriating, and on the other, it’s completely unsurprising. This is what Apple does, over and over again. Mac. iPod. iPhone. iMovie. You name it. When you buy into something Apple, you’re not only buying into that thing – you’re buying into a whole ecosystem of (sometimes really expensive) stuff to support it and to work well with it. And for most of the people, most of the time, it does work well, very well, in fact. And for many people — myself included — on the average, it’s worth it. By excluding so many features from their software, those features that are included are all the more easier to use. As an interaction designer (and a human), I appreciate this simplicity.

Now that I know the limitations of iMovie ‘09, I probably won’t use it again for doing any kind of substantial video editing. But I will always look back fondly on the good times we shared together, and appreciate him for all of the good qualities, such as learnability, a snazzy user interface and some cool visual effects.

And I thought I read somewhere  that they had a ‘Timeline’ feature back in iMovie ‘06 ….

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!

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.