Skip to main content

My Evaluation of Hulu

I evaluated Hulu as one part of my group’s final project, which is to examine multiple streaming services for usability concerns. Before this evaluation, all I really knew about Hulu was that it 1) wasn’t Netflix and 2) has ads. I only have access to Hulu because it came as a package with Spotify for students. That being said, I usually don’t browse through Hulu unless I’ve exhausted all of my other options trying to find a specific title. Since I didn’t know very much about it, I was pleasantly surprised by my findings. Here, I will share some of my observations about Hulu's content organization, playability, and accessibility.

To start, Hulu’s content organization does some things well and some things not so well. Among the things that the service does well is allowing viewers to distinguish between movies and TV shows very quickly. To further this, once one of those options has been selected, viewers can narrow their search down by limiting the results to specific genres. Hulu makes these options very easy to find because they are at the top of the screen. After this, though, the organization gets a little bit messy. There are inconsistencies in the size of the content icons. The options that Hulu chooses to enlarge also seem to be whatever Hulu wants to promote, not what Hulu thinks I as the viewer would be interested in seeing. If Hulu tailored its promoted content to match what the user likes, it might make the promotions more effective. Hulu also sorts movies/shows into categories such as “For You”, “Classics”, etc. which is helpful, but the order that these categories are shown does not seem to have a purpose.

Hulu’s playability is another place for concern. The service lets viewers automatically begin playback on their main featured title and titles under the “Keep Watching” category. What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is how on the titles not in these categories or those being promoted, Hulu puts a white play button in the middle of the title’s icon when the viewer’s mouse scrolls over it. To me, pressing a play button should begin the playback of the movie. This button, however, brings up another page with the movie’s details and another play button that actually lets viewers begin playback. The icons also have three dots in the upper right-hand corner that take viewers to the detail page. I feel like it is unnecessary to have two buttons serve the same purpose, especially when one of them is widely recognized as having a certain function.

Hulu does well when it comes to accessibility. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could customize the subtitle’s font, size, color, highlight, shadow, etc. I’ve never come across the option to do this before. In addition, Hulu offers voice commands, keyboard shortcuts, closed captions, subtitles, screen readers, and audio descriptions. Hulu also offers guidance on how to set these options up. Another area where Hulu excels is in affordability. Its base cost is less than many streaming services; it starts at $5.99/month. However, there are expensive add-ons for channels like HBO Max and Live TV.

Overall, Hulu isn’t bad. It does have some flaws, but none make the service completely inoperable. There are other aspects to Hulu that I didn't explore, such as the range of titles and genres Hulu offers. I think it could be interesting to compare the types of titles Hulu offers with the titles Netflix and other popular streaming services offer. I also did not spend much time analyzing the actual playback of Hulu's content. Both of these could be areas to explore further.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Think “Experience Architecture”

At the beginning of this class, we were assigned readings and videos about airports in order to conceptualize the main theme of the course, experience architecture. Experience architecture is the design of spaces (architecture) for users (experience), such as an airport. In de Botton's work, "A Week at the Airport," de Botton addresses a doubt about experience architecture that sheds light on the scope in which the concept applies. "Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration...[and] yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of a chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic." (de Botton, 2009, p. 3-4). Simply put, experience architecture is design that is meant for the experience of the user. De Botton communicates this through an exp...

Is Experience Architecture The Future of Professional Writing?

As a team of Professional Writing students, our mission is to discover how the Professional Writing major is evolving and share how and why experience architecture is making its way to the forefront of the field . It is our hope that readers of this blog — whether they might be current students, past students, prospective students, or professors — learn the ins-and-outs of the major and begin to see how the worlds of writing and design intertwine.  Professional Writing is currently a fairly popular major among universities, but one of the most interesting things about the field is that it’s always evolving. So what is the Professional Writing major anyway? When it comes to a major like this one, there isn’t a set plan of study among universities. In fact, the course requirements and the definition itself differ from school to school. Because of its natural diversity and constant evolution, Professional Writing doesn’t exactly have a clear future. If design and usability are becomin...

Proposed Plan for Socially Distanced User Study of Wix.com

Plan for User Study: www.Wix.com I. Introduction Although a usability test is unlikely in this socially-distanced and pandemic-filled world, if I were to do one, this post describes how I would see myself doing it as well as a basic overview of my plan of study, had this been an option. II. Identifying Users 1. The users of this site align most with the age group of 20-35. This demographic uses Wix primarily for educational purpose and small business website platforms. 2. Users in this case will work through website creation, as that is the main function of the site. III. Target Identification of Problems Below are the main heuristics and an associated question to further explore the content of the site as I plan a User Study. A. Engagement Are the screen and workplace too crowded, and are they layered to maximize engagement? Is the site   nested too deeply with helpful tools to be useful? B. Error Tolerance Does the Help Desk analysis show enough specific problem de...