Friday, May 25, 2018

More Bad Ux by Google and the Value of RSS Feeds to Avoid Bad UX Practices

These are my slighted edited comments on the Vlogbrothers video by Hank Green on the very bad User Experience of YouTube Subscriptions that Google made even worse recently (I take it that is what happened, I avoid that by using RSS feeds to access the content I want to view).

Google has been really bad at UX (user experience) for a long time. I use RSS feeds to manage the content I want to enjoy and it works great (for blogs and You Tube and podcasts). Thankfully Google hasn't broken this yet (though given their track record in the last 10 years it would not surprise me if they do at some point).

Of course it will be easy for creators to generate their own RSS feed for their videos if Google does break it. I created several feeds on my personal site for (selected blog posts by John Hunter and a time travel feed for my blog posts*).

By the way Hank, it would be great if you would create RSS feeds that let me do things like subscribe to specific courses in crash course. Frankly, I have long thought it is pretty lame that this doesn't exist. This link to Crash Course literature videos for example should have an RSS feed of all the videos. Given Google's lame Ux it isn't so amazing that it is missing an RSS feed. But it is super easy to create a RSS feed from some [whatever your corporate overload name is - nerdfighters or ?] that let people easily have feeds that have good Ux and give them the granularity to pick what they want to add to an RSS reader.

As you mentioned in your video, while many users may have failed to take advantage of RSS readers, many power users have. So cater to them. Also encourage others to use this extremely useful tool which does many great things including shielding your from the extremely bad Ux practices of many of the huge internet giants.

* the Curious Cat time travel feed adds a new post each day using posts from my blogging history (which stretches back 14 years now).

Related: Curious Cat Travel YouTube channel - Filter Out Links to Lame Websites on Reddit - Getting Around Bad Web Page Layouts - Poor Web Site User Experience (Ux) for Investing Data