Ustream quickly renders new UI Design and Feature Set
Ustream hit the world by storm at the Web 2.0 Expo just a few weeks ago. They were smart to be one of the first to market, and reached out to bloggers like Chris Pirillo (see his live experience), and the PodTech bloggers to trial out the service.
“You can’t walk very far without being caught on camera at the Web 2.0 Expo, being held at Moscone in San Francisco this week. Today, Jeremiah Owyang of PodTech had his tripod fixed on the third-floor, live-streaming tables upon tables of lunching attendees. I stopped by to ask him what he was doing and he swung the camera around to beam down on our chat.” -NewTeeVee reports
Fast launch left much to desire in first version
It was a good first generation trial, but the biggest complaint from users was the clunky, non-tuitive user interface. It took several steps to stream a show, and features were hidden under strange nomenclature. It looks like that’s ending now.
Notable improvements in this release
Ustream has launched a new revision of their site with an improved user experience. They’ standardized the look, provided some ‘2.0′ styling, and made the front page more of a TV guide and destination to see what’s being ustreamed. There’s also a variety of hooks to blogs, viral tagging software and other tools to help your stream go farther. The most important feature? Remembering my ID and password so I don’t have to login everytime. Second best feature? I can launch my show in three clicks from the homepage, making my life easier.
While cruising around the “my profile” area, I noticed enhanced permission settings, you could stream to your friends only, or by age, or even gender. I see this as being a great tool for businesses to do private streams. Killer feature: Archived videos can have permissions, great for creating video on the fly
Compare for yourself:
Old Ustream Interface
New Ustream interface
Ustream has a lot of potential, I really believe it could be the next WebEx. Have suggestions? What else should they improve, leave a comment below.
3 Comments so far
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I only have one major complaint still… that hideous Java applet which they use for the chat.
I liked what they were using before (can’t recollect what technology), which fit nicely into the UI. Unfortunately, it didn’t work right in Safari; but it worked great in the recent WebKit nightlies. *Sigh* oh well.
Hope they work out the kinks and bring it back. Those triangluar scroll-bars in the Java applet make me cringe.
that’s a good point, I’m not a fan of that Java Applet either.
The design isn’t so ugly, but the functionality sucks for experienced IRC users. For someone who just chats and bans, it might be fine, but I like to fine-tune my chat rooms a bit, hire more ops at different levels of status, play with modes a bit, etc. It would be nice to be able to embed your own IRC client on the page; something like pjirc would rock.