Getting ultraviolent about UltraViolet™
When I’m teaching my “So you think you want to be a UXer” class — there is one coming up in June — I try and define “user experience” for the audience. I always say it isn’t just about how something is designed, or how it behaves, but it is about how a digital service makes you feel. And whether it gives the user confidence. And delights and surprises them. And helps them get their task done.
A good UX can be hard to quantify, but you sure know when you are having a bad one. And over Christmas I stumbled over a really good example of a bad one.
Regular readers may have noticed that I quite like Doctor Who, and so of course Santa brought me the latest DVD box set for Christmas. It includes the new UltraViolet™ feature of making digital copies available to owners of the physical product.
The instructions come in a leaflet in the box, and I was eager to try it out. The first instruction is to go to BBCUltraViolet.com. So I typed BBCUltraViolet.com into my browser as instructed, and immediately hit a “website not found” error. I tried some variations like .co.uk or bbc.ultraviolet.com, but no joy. So I Googled it. And discovered that the website doesn’t work without having www. appended to the front of the URL.
User experience point #1: I immediately know that I am almost certainly going to be required to give some personal data to a business that cannot set up their server so that the website works without www. being included in the URL. And one that didn’t test this before printing their instruction leaflet. This does not fill me with confidence.
The leaflet in the DVD box-set includes a unique code for me, that is valid for three years. But the first thing I am asked to do when I get the website to appear is to specify which product it is that I am trying to stream or download.
User experience point #2: Why are you making me do work here? You have issued me with a unique code. How can that unique code not also know what product it applies to? This does not fill me with confidence.
Once I’ve chosen my product, and given the site my email address, I’m then taken to an entirely different website with different branding and a different URL, where I am asked to sign in.
User experience point #3: Why didn’t you send me directly to this service or a sub-domain on this service in the first place? I am suspicious of carrying out transactions involving personal data that shift me around various website domains and brands. That is what people warn me about when they talk about “phishing”. This does not fill me with confidence.
I’m given the choice of creating a Flixster account with an email address and a password, or of signing in with Facebook. I’ve nothing against Facebook — I’ve done a lot of work with them — and I’m fairly certain their algorithms will have already detected my affinity with Doctor Who, but having already been on two websites, I don’t see the need to involve a third one in this transaction that I have already paid for as part of my physical purchase.
So I enter my email address, and choose a password. And once I’ve entered my details, the website throws the error message that an account already exists for that email address, so please sign in with Facebook.
What? You were offering me the chance to set-up an account, but if I already had one, now my only option is to sign in with Facebook?
It is possible I have previously connected Flixster and Facebook somewhere along the way, although I don’t use their service regularly, so I don’t recall. I go into my Gmail to search for Flixster.com to see if I can find any trace of a previous registration email. I can’t, but I can find quite a few emails from them, so I open one at random and click a link in it, hoping to see if I can find a way to reset my password or sign in to their main site.
The link I click 404s.
This does not fill me with confidence.
What should the user experience have been here? I reckon the user journey storyboard should have gone something like this:
- User goes to a website address given with physical product.
- User types in unique download code and gives an email address
- Download or streaming starts
- Later on, an email arrives, thanking the user for their purchase, checking there were no problems with the download, and offering the chance to finishing setting up an account which will help them retrieve their downloads if there is a problem later on.
But back to my user journey. After the 404 error I took control of the user experience myself. I Googled “Doctor Who S07E01 torrent”, and I very much doubt I’ll ever attempt to use UltraViolet™ again.
That probably isn’t the business goal they were hoping to achieve.
Get more blog posts like this via my daily email. Sign up here.
by Martin Belam, March 6, 2013 
I’m a designer and journalist, and the founder of Emblem, a digital consultancy offering user experience design, information architecture and training services. I’ve spent over a decade building products for brands like the Guardian, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC, and now work with clients in the publishing, media, arts, heritage and culture sectors. To find out about working with us, please email.
Martin, have you had any experiences with digital downloads associated with DVDs on the iTunes Store? I have gone that route several times, and the process has been seamless. Perhaps a good example to use as a juxtaposition to your experience with UltraViolet in your class.
And to be honest, after you get through all that crap(as I did when I bought Sherlock Holmes on Blu-Ray) the quality of the digital copy is so horrible that I am sure 480p youtube is better. Not only the resolution is tiny,but the compression must be very heavy and produces lots of artifacts. Totally not worth it, it’s one of the worst products I’ve ever seen.
I bought the kids a DVD with UV on, got through all this to find that they don’t even have a digital copy of that DVD… What? How can that happen? How can the code printed in the box even exist?
In addition, even if they did, seems I couldn’t stream to apple TV…
I’d ripped the disc and watched it before support even got back to me.
You click on a random link from Flixter in your inbox, that link 404s, and you somehow hold that against the user experience of UltraViolet?
I don’t get it.
Hi Jake, I was kind of expecting that links the company who were handling my already crappy UltraViolet™ transaction had directly sent me in email would work.
Wrote this a year ago about how horrible the user experience is: http://www.techimprovement.com/2012/01/first-lethal-weapon-is-great-but.html
Apparently it’s gotten worse, not better.
Just wow … “discovered that the website doesn’t work without having www. appended to the front of the URL.”
This would be utterly laughable if not so devastatingly depressing.
This is disappointing to hear.
I compare this to buying vinyl records, complete with a unique ‘drop card’ insert that allows the owner to download the record as mp3s, which is SO EASY: Go to the dot com, enter the code, commence download.
Why can’t UV be that simple? This is pretty ridiculous, considering we’ve already paid our money.
Besides, unlike torrents (unless the encoder is really really stupid enough to choose the only format VLC can’t play), their crap will only work on a very small minority of platforms (I’d guess Win, OSX maybe, possibly iOS and if you’re lucky Android). Forget about watching your film on any other OS, be it Linux or Haiku, AROS, AmigaOS…
I totally agree with this. I have given up trying to download a a film i got for Christmas be because it was so poor.
Why can’t the iPhone app be built to read in a QR code that is printed in the DVD inside cover, from the it just downloads (you are already signed in to the app, and were asked to sign in / sign up when you first downloaded it)
The problem here I suspect is there are too many stakeholders all wanting to get their hands on our data, hence why we get pushed around multiple sites. Great post.
I was once at a presentation by a Sony executive about UV, I was rather disgusted by their ‘one size fits all’ approach to licensing. UV is a hamstrung approach to the problem of multi-platform viewing of purchased content. They have “generously” allowed us to have five people in our “household”, but you can’t get divorced, children can’t move out of home and you can’t have a “complicated” family. I am sure that Sony, et al. don’t believe in selling their products to such abnormal groups of people.
Their approach should have been more open, federated, and flexible. But I am sure the studio lawyers would have choked on their lunch if those words had ever been used in their presence.
Martin, thanks for describing my experience to a tee. The whole thing seemed to be an experiment in how to annoy the customer at every turn.
Ever thought of just running that bad boy through a DVD to file converter – a lot safer and probably more legal than an illegal download :)
I fail to see how downloading something you have already purchased the physical and digital rights to is illegal even if the digital means was different from the issuer’s intentions. Whatever happened to getting what you paid for?
The ‘Triple Play’ or ‘Digital Copy’ disks that use a download copy from iTunes work exactly as you asked for: stick the disc in your computer, or enter a single-use code in iTunes, and the movie downloads. Job done.
Here is the main problem with the UltraViolet user experience: if I am close to WiFi, I am probably already at home and watching the content on Blu-Ray.
Sure, I can download the movie onto my phone/tablet/computer, but I don’t always have the time to start the download 1-2 hours before I know I am leaving and the media doesn’t transfer from my computer to my phone or tablet. Basically, the UltraViolet service, which should add value to my buying decisions, currently makes the media lose value if I am deciding between a combo with a iTunes direct download and a combo with UltraViolet.
To some studios’ credit (Fox, Universal, Lionsgate), they still allow consumers to choose either an iTunes download or an UltraViolet copy (and in the best cases, both).
At the heart of this issue is the battle between closed ecosystems (iTunes) and more open ecosystems (UV). iTunes works well because they control every aspect of the experience and all of the consumer data. But it works. The price you pay is that your collection will always be tied to Apple, so they’ve got you locked in.
UltraViolet is cobbled together by more than 80 companies, resulting in a mess of systems that need to talk to each other. Now, you can buy or redeem from many different retailers, and transport your collection to many brands of devices. You’re not quite as locked in — in the sense that you can shop around and move your collection to new services and devices — but it’s a complicated setup.
I’m a fan of Apple and iTunes, but given the choice I would rather not have my content locked into one company. Once you get UltraViolet working, it’s not bad, but boy was it a struggle to get it to work.
Hi Martin, I just tried this and bbcultraviolet.com DID work. And I tried creating a Flixster account when I already had one, and Facebook was NOT the only option. I did get “Error 50001″ at the point, which isn’t great, but there was a box on screen to the right (maybe you missed that), allowing me to login with my existing details, which I did and it all worked fine after that. You’re right that they could make the redemptions code title-unique, but then you would need to make the code a couple of digits longer (if you want the code to have the same security), which is more for the user to enter, so it doesn’t come at zero price. And just to finish, yes, you do get sent to a new site to enter your code, but you do that by hitting a button which clearly says “Redeem with Flixster” so its not like they didn’t give you a warning (though I think the warning could be clearer). Seb