I've been using Hulu for almost three years now, and it's been exciting to watch it develop into a near-mainstream solution for watching TV online. I'm a subscriber of Hulu Plus, and while it has its own issues (missing past episodes of shows, too many ads in a paid product, etc), it's still the easiest way to catch HD TV shows online.
However, there is a glaring UX mistake on the Queue page where users can stack up future videos to watch. I'm surprised no one at Hulu has caught this and fixed it yet.
The problem: When hovering over a show thumbnail on the queue page, a play icon appears, but clicking on the play button/thumbnail takes the user to the show's index page, rather than the video page. Over time, it has become an accepted standard that a play icon indicates that something will start playing when the icon is clicked. In this case, the play icon doesn't actually play a video. Instead to play a video, the user has to click on the video title. (Everywhere else on the site, clicking on a play button starts playing a video.)
I can't count the number of times I have mindlessly clicked on the thumbnail/play button, expecting the video to start playing. If I were consciously thinking about where I am clicking, I would know not to click on the thumbnail. But too many times, I don't actually think about what I'm doing. I see a play button and I click on it - it's just a habit that has been formed over years of clicking play buttons, and I have been conditioned over time to expect a specific action to take place.
You might say I'm nit-picking, and this whole blog is over nothing important at all. And you wouldn't be wrong. But it's stuff like this that defines a great user experience. A great user experience is one that takes into account the mindless users like myself and gets me where I want to go, the first time.
