“Watching television will enter a new dimension,” the ads told me, so I was very curious about that “new dimension” experience. How would the designers manage to offer this ‘watching television’ functionality on a mobile device?
First of all, let me say that Telenet deserves credit for being the first mover. But since first movers like getting better, let me give some sound UX advice about Yelo.

My first impression was: ”This is still beta”. Labels are too long for the label space on the iPhone, like in ‘Mijn zenders’.
Advice nr 1: Clean up the pixels. Aesthetic integrity is rule nr 1 in Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Principles: ”A Great User Experience Is Rooted in Your Attention to Detail”.

To navigate between the different categories in ‘TV-gids’, I need to use the utterly non standard horizontal swiping (iPhone only). Horizontal scrolling is a mess. The yellow arrows look like a hot zone but are merely indicators. People are comfortable with the standard gestures because the built-in applications use them consistently. This is not a standard gesture.
Advice nr 2: Clean up the interaction in ‘TV-gids’ on the iPhone.

About the information architecture, I wonder what the reason is behind the navigation ‘Mijn zenders’, ‘Vlaams’, ‘Anderstalig’, etc. To me, this categorization is not intuitive. What are ‘Mijn zenders’? Is this something I control in my settings? Does Telenet decide what my channels are? There is also a category ‘Thema’s’ in ‘TV-gids’, which is merely a list from BBC to Discovery. This strange way of structuring channels is a legacy from TV.be.
Advice nr 3: Rethink the information architecture. Restructure the channels in such a way that it reflects the users’ mental model.

Remote recording is definitely an added value, but the action buttons need some work. ‘P’ is for ‘programming’ on the iPhone/iPad, but ‘R’ is for ‘recording’ on the Digicorder.
When you press ‘P’, you have to choose ‘Bewaar’ in the Programming Settings on the iPhone. Not only is this very different from the Digicorder, but also unlike the Yelo website where you have to choose ‘Bevestigen’.
You lack consistency here. Consistency in the interface allows people to transfer their knowledge and skills from one application or platform to another. A consistent application is not a slavish copy of other applications. Rather, it is an application that takes advantage of the standards and paradigms people are comfortable with.

On the iPad, the program info in ‘TV Gids’ is displayed vertically per time slot but on the Digicorder the time slots are oriented horizontally. There is no logic in this reversed matrix structure.
Advice nr 4: Maximize transfer of knowledge by maximizing consistency within and between apps and platforms.

And some quick giveaways to enhance the user experience:

• Polish the error messages. “Fout bij opname. Probeer later opnieuw” is in no way helping me out.
• Add conflict management to the programming functionality, not only on the iPad/iPhone but on the website as well.
• If you want users to get social, put hot triggers in their path. Offering Gmail invitations on the Yelo website is an excellent idea, but having a buggy implementation is not a hot trigger. If I want to share a program using Twitter, redirect me to the Yelo app and not to the Yelo website after first time registration.
• Debug ‘Mijn opnames’. Planned recordings often do not show in this list, resulting in old style user behavior like sending a text message home: “Please record my favorite show! I’m sure I programmed it, but it doesn’t show in the list”.
• Think about pushing suggestions based on past recordings (on request, obviously). In order to do so, solve the ‘favorites’ issues on the website. It’s unclear how you can favorite a program.

Advice nr 5: The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Finally, it might have been a better idea to aim at the majority users first, and to offer Yelo on the Mac and PC.
Do some usability testing, gather feedback, learn and improve, cut and polish. And then move on to the mobile minority. A less sexy approach, maybe, but a lot more sensible.

Sigrid