Playlist Potential

Playlists, please.

If the tvOS team talked with the iTunes and Apple Music teams more often, I think they'd see a missed opportunity for a commonly used and shared format: playlists. The Watchlist sometimes fetches all the latest new episodes, but I may still need to scroll horizontally for a while to cherry pick the first thing I want. Normally, my watching pattern is consistent enough to go on auto pilot mode. I wish I could pre-select and save certain groupings of media channels available through the Apple TV. One imagining could be a "Home DJ" app.

Or something of the like

I would be able to create a playlist, specifically selecting shows to populate with random episodes, sequentially, or only for new and unwatched content. Music breaks can be inserted, with duration set by number of songs or a specific period of time. Scrolling up while the TV is active on any current item would bring up the playlist and the ability to jump ahead to future items. 

When a playlist ends, the Apple TV returns to screensaver, letting me return to my life and decide what my activity will be. The number of clicks and necessary jumps between apps to watch a "normal" amount of content has too much friction. All the pieces are there for tvOS to be better. Playlists seems like a low hanging fix with oversized returns.  

A Digital Talking Stick

Media consumption could be so much more enjoyable than it is now. We're a household of laziness, and repeating patterns. The Apple TV remains the default media faucet for us, beating out the Roku, PS4, and Xbox One as having the least amount of friction. Dinner prep begins while putting something on in the background. If it were easier I'd probably just play music through the HomePod. Instead, CNN, Stephen Colbert's monologue, or an episode of the French Chef with Julia Child may stream out. 

While consuming the stream, I'll often run into a small item on my phone I want to share temporarily on the Apple TV: a new song, a video of the recipe we're making, an Overwatch League game. What I want to do is set a temporary exception to the current stream: play this media from my phone until it ends, then return to the original stream. Instead, I have to adjust my settings and turn AirPlay on for my phone, flipping all streaming content to come from my phone. Only when I'm done and I go back and disable AirPlay does the native content return to the Apple TV: even then it usually requires an additional 'menu' button press to get the original stream content to play once more. 

I wish the 'play' button could be used to temporarily stream to a device, then release. The 'AirPlay' button requires too many steps. 

Instead of providing a separate button to flick AirPlay routing on and off, why not provide long tap or 3D Touch options available when clicking the 'play' button on any given media? Bringing up a context sensitive drop down would allow you to project playback of only the content linked to the 'play' button to whichever device is selected. All of the component pieces to do this are there in Apple's hands already. They're so close to having something that would be so much less intrusive and annoying when it comes to consuming media on my terms. Especially in households with multiple people, give us a better way to share with each other and temporarily control the digital talking stick. 
 

My Apple TV Should Know Better

Every weekday morning follows a pattern. Get up, make coffee, grab the newspapers, and throw on a late-night episode from the night before. I turn on the TV, press 'menu' to wake up the Apple TV, and wait for it to load an outdated watchlist. Clicking on the 'TV' app brings a new view that loads with a few more new episodes of followed shows visible from the night before: still no Seth Meyers though. 

A long hold and jump to the Hulu app leads me to a loading screen while Hulu fetches my new content. Somehow their 'Lineup' panel and 'Keep Watching' still haven't caught on that I watch Late Night with Seth Meyers first thing in the morning. So I navigate up to 'My Stuff', down to 'TV Shows', click on the appropriate square for Seth Meyers, land on an individual page view for the episode, and hope that by this time NBC has properly uploaded the ad-free version of the show. Even at eight in the morning on the west coast, I sometimes have to fall back to the DVR recording of the show from NBC Bay Area with natural commercials as well as inserted Hulu-only commercials. All this and more for a low, low price of $40 a month.

The more time I spend with the Apple TV, the more convinced I am that Apple cannot provide the seamless experience I would expect from their product offerings. Even the facets of the Apple TV that fall in line with Apple's vertical integration, such as purchasing TV shows from iTunes, don't work the way I'd expect. We're a household that buys all episodes of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee ahead of time with season passes. And yet just yesterday we realized we were two episodes (weeks!) behind. Apple's bundling of episodes had completed for our previous purchase. In no way were we warned or presented with the offer to buy the next volume of episodes. In order for new ones to populate the watchlist, we had to search for 'Samantha Bee,' hunt around in the UI for the proper volume, purchase it and watch the first one. Problem solved until the next volume of episodes releases. 

Let's not mention this delightful app that somehow never remembers the only Apple TV it has ever connected to in the phone's lifetime. 

My Apple TV is connected to wired ethernet and power, yet it behaves as though it's operating from a very low battery and doing it's hardest to save me on my data plan: please don't. Ideally Apple would establish push-notification style connections for these content providers so that as they put up new material, my Apple TV is alerted and refreshes accordingly. If that's a bridge too far, then how about setting a refresh point early in the morning to fetch all relevant content from the night before? I'm tired of dancing with the watchlist, scrolling through and selecting something only for the watchlist to refresh mid-scroll and lead me to selecting unintended content. Why do I need to launch the Hulu app and then wait for content to refresh? I have seen and know there is some precedent for background refreshes of apps, but it seems like it only happens when the Apple TV is awake. This should be done before I begin engaging with the device for the day. Is it poor planning, poor coding, or both? Whatever the reasons, it leaves me stewing, waiting for a competitor that gets in the way less of how I want to watch things. 

Context Is Key

Every time I leave a restaurant, I wonder who else I think could share the experience and enjoy it. I've never ascribed to the notion that meals or restaurants can be statically analyzed and locked into a certain point on a good-bad sliding scale. The rush to summary judgment tends to color most Yelp reviews I read, rendering them unhelpful and unrelatable to me. Part of the problem may be word choice and messaging on these social media platforms.

Yelp users have to be proactive to understand how reviews can be more helpful.

When you click "Start your review" on a restaurant in Yelp, you'll be taken to the view above. Note the minimal guidelines displayed to the user. The first sentence's intention seems to be empowerment of the user and their words, while the second sentence implies a high worry or concentration of fake reviews. It's still not clear what makes a good "Yelp" review yet. The "Read our review guidelines" link fleshes things out a little, but it's only once you expand the "Review Guidelines" section that a person is given a picture of the "best" kind of reviews. I don't know why they bury these guidelines so deep. It seems clear most Yelpers haven't read the guidelines or actively ignore them. 

This is the kind of content that should be on the first view for reviewing.

Food critics like Michael Bauer usually visit a restaurant multiple times to get as many perspectives on a restaurant before rendering judgment. This review of Dumpling Time for instance, dings their soup dumplings for being a little too sticky across "visits", plural. A seasoned food critic reporting that detail means a lot more to me than this Yelp review calling out the gyoza dough with "It was very sticky and strange." I wish Yelp would adhere to their own guidelines and rename the section "Experiences" rather than "Reviews".

Not knowing the person, I look at every yelp review with a critical eye and zero assumptions about their justifications. Do you live in the area? Did you go out of your way to visit with inflated expectations because of another friend? Were you already starving before they took your name for the wait list? Was the parking experience so painful as to torpedo the visit? The only clarity I can get comes from clear communication about what the person was expecting, and what they experienced in the end. If a pizza place gets a 1-star review for not offering gluten free pizza, I can completely ignore that review in deciding to visit: I'm not gluten free and it wouldn't impact my enjoyment. 

There's a time and a place for everything. If I can't pull out the context of their assumptions and variables that informed their decision-making can I understand how I might enjoy the restaurant. Yelp users are not Caesar, rendering life and death punishments with a thumb. Tell me what it was like for you, and I'll try to guess how I'd enjoy it. 

Scale With Me

I love cooking, yet hate eating leftovers. In a game of rock-paper-scissors, cereal beats leftovers every time. This often leads to an annoying step of scaling a recipe down, usually to serve 2 people, before shopping, organizing, and cooking. I wish online recipes would be posted in a manner that best fits the known profile of a given user. 

A device's screen-size can be used to determine the best presentation for an app or website when launched from my phone. I want to see sites like Serious Eats take similar steps to best render their content aka recipes. With a login, I should be able to set the default number of servings I want to make with any given recipe. 

We need this kind of foresight in recipe distribution as well.

When I request a recipe, I want the page to see my session cookie, read my servings preference, and serve me the recipe instructions scaled to my liking. While ingredients by weight or volume should be easy to scale, things like eggs or vanilla beans will need to be handled more delicately. A recipe designed to serve 3 that requires 1 egg will need the egg's contents converted to weight, then proportioned. Different regions have different average chicken egg sizes, so knowing where the recipe came from and where you are currently browsing would also be helpful in a more accurate scaling-down. Buying a dozen eggs, whisking them together and storing in a jar in the fridge seems like the biggest friction point to liberate recipe sizes. 

Serious Eats allows you to alter how a recipe is presented with images, but not its yield.

With support for scaling, a recipe website should also support easy ways for users to provide feedback on their scaled recipe attempt and ways they felt it needed to be modified. Things like cooking-time for a pot roast can depend significantly on a minimum surface to volume ratio that just may not work in smaller portions. Frontier recipe testers could encounter this and report back with warning or appraisals for particular recipes at particular serving sizes. 

I may not have enough friends for this recipe as is

I have to make 12 cinnamon rolls in order to get the 2 I actually want to eat. Maybe we can fix that. 

Hey Siri, Help Me Help Myself

Since Apple's HomePod landed at home, there has been a noticeable increase in this household's music consumption. I find myself hunting for albums I think will sound great on the HomePod; showcase songs to flick on when friends are over to wow them. I've even adjusted weekend hangout patterns to play an album or two while I'm on the couch with the boyfriend, each silently lost in our own devices and screens. For something that triggered behavior change so quickly, it frustrates me to no end that I can't remotely recommend the thing to anyone.

Almost as useful as a mac's spinning beach ball.

I've always loved the notion of movie magic, and try whenever possible to make those sorts of magical moments with people I care about. Finding just the right song to put on while cooking together is just the kind of magic that HomePod doesn't want you to make. To get an isolated music experience, you must talk at Siri and awkwardly command this electric servant to fetch and hopefully play the right song. Alternatively, you can pick the song on your iOS device and choose to AirPlay sound to the speaker, locking the two apple products and making it really hard for you to try to then search recipes on sites with crappy ad banners that want to also project sound through the HomePod. I don't like phone calls and talking through a device at humans; I find talking solely to a device even more annoying. 

This speaker has incredible sound quality, but a non-existent UI and a really limited set of UX choices really handicap it from being a must-buy. I want an app that lets anyone on the shared wifi network with the HomePod to be able to queue up music that is sourced from the HomePod and not parasitically AirPlayed from a device and blocking some of its functionality.  When setting up AirPlay, you can at least see what was last being played on the speaker. Apple should give me a HomePod app or a new way to navigate the Music app wherein all music choices are saved and queued up on the speaker itself. 

Right now the HomePod is a DJ with great gear that I need to talk to every time I want music. Make it easier (and quieter) for me to curate music to play from it and I'd be singing its praises left and right. No one wants awkward back and forth with their DJ at home. 

Use My Cookies For Good

On a day to day basis, I spend most of my internet browsing time in incognito tabs. I reserve normal browser windows for the few services I use that require them: email access, Amazon ordering, Netflix and Hulu. Two primary motivations factor into this. For one, I like reading a lot of news paper sites. I don't feel the current paywall offerings justify maintaining separate logins and spreading my credit card's numbers all over town. Secondly, I have a strong derision for targeted ads. The opaqueness of the advertising companies is a little too creepy, and usually they target the version of myself in the past. If I search for a particular vacuum, perhaps the best that ever existed, I spend a modest and minimal amount of time deciding on a purchase and buying right then and there. Months after I've received and and beaten down said vacuum cleaner, ad networks sample my cookies, see an instance of a vacuum, and continue to fill my screens with a decision from the past.

For my cookies and data to be shared, I would only give my consent if I felt it selfishly benefited me. Only one scenario comes to mind: providing proof of new or on-the-bubble shows to networks that show my viewership via means outside the normal Nielson television ratings. I cut the cord two years ago, and rely solely on a disappointing Apple TV for access to media content. As slick as tvOS may look, I doubt it's doing any smart connecting of dots on the programs I watch. 

For brand new shows, they have to overcome so many hurdles to not only appear interesting or of interesting merit, but also fit into my (albeit self-inflicted) requirements for ease of consumption. Netflix, HBO Now and Hulu Plus are sunk costs to me that are just good enough for their ease and content. They are my default options to fetch new content

Say a show premieres. Can I watch it next-day on Hulu? That to me is free "sampling" of new content. I have to rely on promos, word of mouth, or reviews to get over my hesitance to jump into a new show. If I can't see it for free, I need to be absolutely convinced it is for me before I go and buy an episode or the full season. 

I want the producers of these shows to know of the success stories for some of their marketing and distribution plans. Two recent examples come to mind: Fargo and Man Seeking Woman, from FX and FXX respectively. With each show, I had heard good word of mouth. For whatever reason, my interest never rose to the point that I would pull the trigger and buy the season on iTunes, the only viewing option available to me given my restriction. Second seasons roles around for each show, and by this time Hulu now offers season one, "free" to me. A quick pace at knocking out season one episodes lead to an immediate purchase of the still-airing second seasons of both.

View fullsize

SHARING IS CARING

I like these shows. I want more of these types of shows. But their marketing campaigns didn't pique my interest initially. What sold me on it was the access to the content on platforms I subscribe to already. I want Apple to share everything about my viewership details from Hulu as well as the purchase and consumption from iTunes to the show's producers. There are eyeballs and dollars to be made from sources that may not report much data to producers currently. Please share my cookies for good. I want more good television. If my consumption and purchase history could help shows I like that are fighting cancelation, then give the data to them.