Amazon Unbox
1 comments
I also had a less than ideal experience while playing with Unbox. During setup it asks for your username and password, but does not verify that they are valid. I mistyped one, and as a result it was unable to download the item I had purchased. This wouldn't be a big deal except that there is no way to change your username and password through the software. I finally figured that the only way to change them was to uninstall the software and then install it again. Unfortunately, the uninstaller is not smart enough to kill the Unbox process before attempting to uninstall, so it hangs indefinitely. I had to make sure Unbox was completely dead before the uninstall would work.
In short, it took much longer than it should have to purchase and watch a video. And all of my troubles could have been avoided with either a simple verification during setup, or an option to change the password somewhere in the software (this may be missing because of DRM restrictions).
The quality of the video was fine, and the download was reasonably fast. The user experience was terrible, as was the UI for the Unbox software.
My parents (smart, but not terribly computer savvy) can purchase and enjoy media via iTunes. They would not be able to use Unbox.
In short, it took much longer than it should have to purchase and watch a video. And all of my troubles could have been avoided with either a simple verification during setup, or an option to change the password somewhere in the software (this may be missing because of DRM restrictions).
The quality of the video was fine, and the download was reasonably fast. The user experience was terrible, as was the UI for the Unbox software.
My parents (smart, but not terribly computer savvy) can purchase and enjoy media via iTunes. They would not be able to use Unbox.
I know that Amazon may be handicapped by what it can do on this platform (system based DRM and such), but my question is: why not develop these applications first on another platform (mac or linux) and get it done right first with a group of users that really want access to this type of service, then port it to windows with a precedence of how it should work? Also, I don't understand how if I have problems with this, the average user is going to make it work. Have my standard just been raised in the past year or so using non-windows environments causing my frustration levels to increase when I run into problems with this, or is this just another poor user experience due to lack of effort by the software developers?