BT's Sports online player - which being polite is piss poor and with the UX design provided by a six year old - is a fine example of how not to deal with errors in user interfaces. "User" being the key word here...Rather than accepting users are human beings in need of meaningful error messages, and perhaps in-situ advice about what to do about it, they insist on providing cryptic codes with no explanation and which you need to google the meaning of (ok, I admit I ignored the FAQ!). This will lead you to an appalling page; clearly knocked up by the six year olds senior sibling on day one of code-club, littered with links you need to eyeball which finally leads you to something useful telling you how to deal with the idiocy of BT's design decisions.
In this particular case the decision some halfwit architect made which requires users to downgrade their security settings (e.g. VC002 or VC040)! So a national telecom provider and ISP is insisting that users weaken their online security settings so they can access a half arsed service?...
Half-arsed since when you do get it working it performs abysmally with the video quality of a 1996 RealAudio stream over a 28.8 kbps connection. This likely because some mindless exec has decided they don't want people watching on their laptops, they'd rather they use the "oh-god-please-don't-get-me-started-on-how-bad-this-device-is" BT Vision Box - I feel sick just thinking about it...
In non-functional terms:
- Form - Fail
- Performance - Fail
- Security - Fail
- Operability - Well all I know is that it failed on day one of launch and I suspect it's as solid as a house of cards behind the scenes. Lets see what happens if the service falls over at champions league final kick-off!
Success with non-functionals alone doesn't guarantee success - you need a decent functional product and lets face it, champions league football is pretty decent - but no matter how good the function, if it's unusable, if it makes your eyes bleed, if it performs like a dog, if it's insecure and if its not reliable then you're going to fail! It's actually pretty impressive that BT have managed to fail on (almost) every count! Right, off now to watch something completely different not supplied by BT... oh, except they're still my ISP because - quelle surprise - that bit actually works!
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