Wednesday, July 4, 2018

How not to: design and manage mobile applications. Eurosport Player example


I've been using Eurosport Player for years and can state that this is one of the most buggy and bad designed mobile application I ever seen.

Ok, I must admit it does not crash anymore, what it did in past frequently. It's updated regularly, though not necessarily to a better condition (for example, you can get additional context ads playing before every video in the updated version, whereas there were no such ads in the previous one - and they call this "critical update" ;-); apart from that they prefer to show bulcky selfish ads overriding important live actions, lasting for tens of minutes in a row, as though their directors went away). It does somehow work and present more or less content. But it is definitely not of the quality I expect for money.

First, the app demonstrates inconvenient and inconsistent UI design. Of course, they change UI from time to time in a cardinal way, in attempt to make it better, but actually making it worse. These changes themselves are very painful because you cannot find things on their usual places, and new control principles are not intuitive. I wonder: if they think every new design conforms to human usability, how every new design is drastically different to previous one? Do they suppose the human nature is changing with this frequency or do they rotate developers completely every month? Maybe they do not know themselves what they want (except for money they want constantly)?

The latest version at the time of writing is 6.1.6. Its general look and feel was introduced several months ago. From very beginning I got it, I'm encountering the following problems.

You can't read TV schedule in a familiar form. All is supposed to be interactive and reached through context search. But results are hard to interpret. Even if all filters are switched off, and it's supposed to show all sports, all channels - you can still get a screen without E1 or E2, which is nonsense, because E1 and E2 are showing something at every moment. It's important that you cannot switch on E1 or E2 in this situation. It's illustrated by the following screenshot:




Where is E2? Sometimes you can get nothing at all - neither E1 nor E2 current programs - and can only see stubs of Upcoming programs planned for later time.

This is a sporadic bug, which happens from time to time and vanishes itself after a while. Still this is very annoying because you can't switch to required channel at specific moment.

There is no a common timeline (exactly as a timeline, which was present in some previous versions, and allowed users to monitor many activities at once), no specific channel schedule (E1, E2), no special events broadcasting schedule in additional streams. Again, I mean a schedule with separated channels (such as videos from show courts on tennis tournaments) and time spans (when it starts, when it stops), and not a mosaic mess of splash images. And again, this feature was present in former times.

There is no way to read full text of titles of programs, because most of titles are truncated with ellipsis. This bug lives in Eurosport Player forever.

They don't know what is the full-screen mode. They do actually provide a button to switch it on, but their implementation leaves navigation bar on screen, so videos take only part of the space they could take.

There is no portrait screen orientation. I admit that video content is better displayed in landscape orientation, but Eurosport Player is not the only app on your device, and running it in parallel with something other requires you to rotate the device. Besides many UI forms in the player are free from videos, yet they are locked in landscape as well.

Ok, let us stop with UI problems and look at other things.

There is no way to check or manage your subscription from the app. You can only change email, password, name, and favourites. Or you can read app version, privacy policy, terms of use, and FAQ. Or you can finally do log out.

Here is the screenshot:



By the way, there is no option to start a new subscription right away - instead it will start only after 1 week of trial period (during which your card is not charged). This is inconvenient, because exchange rates can change, and you should actually monitor balance of the card until the week runs out. If it could be executed instantly, current balance and exchange rate would be known exactly, and the process finished in a blink - without more fuss. Even if this trial seems cool for someone, why not to provide an option to skip it, especially if this is not the very first time when subscription made? Probably Eurosport implies that a decent subscriber should have a sizeable credit on his/her card. But even so, I personally prefer, adhering to recommendations of Internet professionals, to use dedicated short-living virtual cards with specially allocated limited amounts, which allows for protecting yourself from modern security threads in e-commerce. If you find it's funny, please, find many stories from clients of big companies and banks, whose credit card data was stolen and exposed in past years. ;-)

In addition to the subscription topic: it's very inconvenient that in-app subscription is only allowed to be monthly:



Where is annual subscription, which is available from the site?

And finally, let’s address the problems related to the content.

Here is what you can see instead of a program:


This happens regularly while I'm in the same country, in the same provider network, so their FAQ does hit and miss in this case. Mostly it can be solved by the app restart.

Another one, similar but different:



This error happens even for 24-hours E1 and E2 channels! Again, the only way to get rid from the message is to kill the app and start it anew - only then you'll get the broadcasting videos.

Sometimes you can get nothing - a blank screen:



You can do nothing with this - just wait when Eurosport stuff awakes and fixes the problem, which is apparently on their servers.

Also I've got the following error several times on my Chromecast while subscription was active:


At those moments I was able to view programs on my tablet, yet TV was not an option. Since Chromecast+TV is preferred method of viewing sports for most users, when it stops working they don't actually get what they paid for. Sometimes the error can be dismissed by switching between different streams, but this does not help every time.  

Last but not the least. Probably this is most important, because it's not resolvable by client-side tricks. Special live streams from big events (such as show courts on tennis grand slams) stop and freeze constantly, while E1 and E2 run ok. Please note, this is not a problem with Internet, or user device, or something, since E1 and E2 works smoothly at the same moment. This looks like a problem with resources provisioning on Eurosport servers. They don't provide enough CPU, or memory, or bandwidth amounts, or compression class to ensure proper service quality on the additional streams. The additional streams are the main reason why I use Eurosport Player. With this problem the player is absurdly overpriced for one single channel E2 (in my case, I have E1 in my cable). And I tell you even more: the service becomes more and more expensive. For example, in 2017 I paid 15 in euro equivalent, and in 2018 it's already 30! 100% increase! For this 12 month euro exchange rate increased only by 9%.

I renewed my Eurosport Player subscription for the last time. If they don't improve (or give 91% discount ;-/), I'll leave.

If you know an alternative service for international sports broadcasting please let me know. If it's not exist, our last resort is free streams published by some altruists in the Internet. They are hard to find, they have their own drawbacks, but they do not pretend cool guys and do not beg for money for nothing.

PS. Eurosport support is not reachable. In response to my email to advertised support-com@eurosportplayer.com, I receive a short reply that the address is no longer in use. Sending emails to support@eurosportplayer.com, which is used as return address for payments confirmation, returns SMTP error:

550 Callout verification failed: 550 "support@eurosportplayer.com" is not a known user

You may also try to fill out a feedback form on their site as I did, but you'll hardly get a response.

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