

Getting Ultra Violent about Ultraviolet - jumpbug
http://martinbelam.com/2013/ultraviolet/

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nowarninglabel
One interesting takeaway I had from this experience is that it's really a
combination of many failures in the user experience that makes this such a
frustrating experience. Had there been but one or two pitfalls along the way
it probably would have gone ok, but instead even as a reader I am left upset
about the process and failures here. But thinking about their developers, it
was probably many different people or even many different teams that worked on
each part of this, and are all probably unaware of each other's failures.

Thus, it's reminds me quite of a bit of the engineering crisis of 1978 for the
Citigroup building which only reached crisis levels because of so many
combined cut corners and failures together
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_cr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_crisis_of_1978)

~~~
pixl97
In both cases (UV and the building) is there were plenty of successful designs
that could have been copied from.

It's even sadder in the case of UV that there must have been no end user
testing before shoveling this out on the customer. Add on the entire website
seems designed to extract information on Facebook accounts so they can keep
tabs on you, it's obvious that none of this is about customer satisfaction or
usability, but about new ways to monetize the customer and give them as little
service as possible.

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ChuckMcM
Another example of using the same email for Facebook and for this app, the
ultraviolet site tries to use the email you gave it with Facebook, if you pick
a different password (as this person did (good for you!) it fails the login
but the email is accepted. So the Ultraviolet guys think "oh you just mistyped
your facebook password."

Ultraviolet loses for a number of reasons and this just highlights a few of
them.

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pixl97
DIVX V2 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX> (note: not the video codec)

OR

"How to make your product fail by ignoring the failures of the past" (Piracy
is free, Apple is easy, lets make are products hard to use and expenive in
this market)

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naner
_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._

Not that this is your fault, but modern browsers will automatically append the
www prefix when needed.

~~~
duskwuff
No, that isn't true. Some sites will _redirect_ from example.com to
www.example.com, but if the user inputs example.com and that URL isn't set up,
the browser won't recover from that. Try it for yourself if you don't believe
me. :)

~~~
naner
Ah. Works in FF but not in Chrome.

