Sneak Peek: Fan 4.2
The last few weeks the Fan development team has been working pretty hard towards the next release of the video player. The new release revisits some of the UI of the application. We hope the changes make it easier to discover other videos from the Fan's library of over 100,000 videos. While the build is still currently in development/bug-fix mode, we figured it would be cool to give a sneak peek of whats coming down the line. So here is the first look at Fan 4.2:
Comcast High Speed Internet service users can preview the application here.
A lot of the design changes have come from user feedback on the Fan forum which the team has monitored closely as well as other user studies performed by the Information Architecture group here.
One of the biggest changes has been the introduction of the "My Playlist" tab in the playlist area next to the video player. Currently, the Fan is always launched with a default set of videos from the Comcast.net site. However, the list is completely customizable by the user: Users can delete videos from the list by clicking on the x icon at the right corner of each list item, add new videos from the tabbed browse area under the player and drag videos to arrange the list in any order they wish. However, the current design didn't announce those features as well. The explicit naming of the two lists will hopfully get users to create a video experience that works best for them.
Another change in the browse view is bigger thumbnails and paged navigation in the tabbed content browse region. We have also reduced the size of the +Playlist button that adds the video to the end of the user's "My Playlist" rather than play it immediately since most users expected the instant play when the clicked on a list item there. So basically we have maximized the area for the default action. The two arrows on either side of the content browser will allow you to browse through the initial set of videos per category.
We've also added a little bit of eye candy that makes the user experience a little smoother. When paging through the navigator at the bottom of the screen, the thumbnails smoothly slide in. Rollover states are now soft transitions instead of instant color changes, and thumbnails get an animated "play" icon when mousing over them.
Hopefully the new features as well as the design tweaks to the user interface will make the video experience a lot better. Feedback on these new features is welcome.