AOTW 4: SeriesGuide
App Of The Week: Each week I choose a mobile application to take for a spin. It might be new and obscure or a widely adopted favorite. I’ll try my best to use the App Of The Week frequently and appropriately. At the end of the week, I’ll report back on the app’s design, functionality, and significance.
Whether you’re a frugal cord-cutter or a display-glued, DVR-at-capacity screen vulture, there is probably some form of TV in your life. Television is a polarizing medium. Some of us are sports nuts, others stick to cooking shows, still others only watch crime dramas, and so on. With hundreds (thousands?) of channels at our fingertips, there’s a lot to watch. SeriesGuide helps you keep up with it all.
Who it’s for: SeriesGuide is for anyone who watches an array of television shows at a time. Sports-only users probably have no need for the application, while most other viewers may find its tracking capabilities useful.
Design
It’s easy to overcomplicate a simple task. Keeping track of the episode you last watched in a TV show probably fits into that category. SeriesGuide manages to plug in a useful number of features without bogging down the interface, though in certain places it toes the line. Adding shows and checking off the episodes you have already viewed is simple, as it should be. Tap the Floating Action Button, type in ‘Game of Thrones’ or what have you, and you’re on your way. Next, click ‘Set Watched’ one by one on the episodes you’ve seen. If you’ve got full seasons to check off, you can manage that by swiping over to ‘Seasons’ on a series’ page and tapping ‘Watched All’ on the particular season’s three-dot menu.
Where SeriesGuide begins to toe the line of simplicity is in the pages designated for individual episodes of a TV show. Selecting an episode reveals the important stuff at the top: buttons for setting it to “watched,” skipping the episode, among others. Also included near the top is a quick synopsis of the episode and a rating provided by trakt.tv. Below that is a number of options that this writer feels could be consolidated to create a cleaner interface. “Extensions” allow the user to search for the particular episode from sources like YouTube and Google Play. Further down on the episode’s page, links for an IMDb page may be helpful, but other features sprinkled in provide little for the average user and only seem to clutter the otherwise neat interface. Overall, SeriesGuide provides a beautiful, if busy experience for the television aficionado.
Functionality
The purpose of the application is the ability to check off episodes of a series that you have seen and view details of episodes yet to come. In that respect, SeriesGuide works beautifully. Digging a little deeper reveals some features that function well, but feel crammed in at times. As an example, clicking the YouTube extension opens the aforementioned app’s search results for “Series Name + Episode Name”. In my experience, this usually produces fan-made reaction videos for the selected episode. While this may be interesting content, I don’t feel that it is necessary in this context, nor is it the type content the feature is designed for. Additional extensions, like Google Play’s, only work if that content is available through the source. For example, clicking the Google Play extension on the page for a Daredevil episode (a Netflix Original), provides nothing.
A native comments section yields some healthy discussion, provided the selected show’s audience is large enough to have made its way to SeriesGuide. The IMDb button provides more detailed information on the plot and cast of an episode. A ‘List’ feature allows for user-defined catalogs for shows and movies. I could see this being used for specific genres and the like. For example, I was able to use a ‘List’ to distinguish Netflix Original programs from the rest of the shows I watch. Additionally, SeriesGuide features a ‘Collections’ box, which seems to function as a “Liked” index, as well as the ability to add shows to your device’s calendar, so you’ll never miss an episode.
A good portion of the app’s content is derived from trakt.tv, a website with a similar purpose to SeriesGuide: helping users track what television shows and movies they have and haven’t watched, gaining valuable, detailed knowledge in the process. In a way, SeriesGuide feels like an extension of trakt.tv. I’d go so far as to say that if the app were called ‘Trakt,’ few users would bat an eye. Ratings are sourced from Trakt, and each person’s shows are stored and maintained on Trakt.tv. SeriesGuide provides a clean interface and some additional features, but it’s clear that a lot of the grunt work is done by utilizing Trakt’s APIs.
I’d be remiss to not mention the app’s movie tracking capabilities, which draw similarities to its television features. If there’s a film you see yourself watching eventually, adding it to your ‘Watchlist’ reflects that intention. Setting a movie as ‘Watched’ helps SeriesGuide provide suggestions for movies to watch in the future. It’s difficult to carve out different applications for SeriesGuide besides the simple “watch it, check it” use-case. However, SeriesGuide has a number of extra qualities to help draw users to its network.
Conclusion
Even with its high density of features, SeriesGuide remains beautiful, utilizing Material Design extensively and appropriately. The application provides a handy service to television viewers with a number of shows on their plate. Yes, Netflix will quickly inform you of the episode next in your queue, as will your cable provider’s on-demand menu, but SeriesGuide gathers all of this information in a convenient place. While certain features feel frivolous, like the native comments section, others, like episode ratings and plot synopses, only enhance the experience.
I’m definitely not a television aficionado. I’m probably closer to the “light user” end of the graph, but I can appreciate an app like SeriesGuide, and see myself actively using it in the future.
Follow Graham at @TweetsByGraham, where he writes about stuff that isn’t apps, like beer, music, college, and dog food.
