TED 12+

Something for everyone here, you could spend all year round educating yourself with these talks or just a few minutes a week. It’s not only educational but fascinating. Talks last from between around 10-40 minutes, so there’s always something for everyone to suit your own level of free time. I’d like to be able to save my favourite speakers, so even if you’re not curating anything by a favourite speaker this month, it would be nice to be notified when someone I enjoy is added to your current collection of talks. Everyone can benefit from something from TED.

The new version of the app is is slow and unresponsive. I can no longer download talk audios (great for a busy commute) meaning I have to download videos which clogs up device storage and takes a long time to download. The new design of the app means that I can’t browse the talks I want to and it just feels clunky. The videos take a very long time to load on mobile signal and when they are loading, the screen is very unresponsive, meaning I have to hard close the app to exit the loading screen (what is the point in having an exit button if it doesn’t work?!). Furthermore, when I finally have a video talk downloaded and playing, it randomly stops about three quarters of the way through, and when I take my phone out on a busy tube to unlock it and resume the video in-app, I have to reload the video completely. Awful UX! Finally, all the talks I previously downloaded were wiped with the new app release.

TED have some phenomenally interesting talks about a wide range of subjects, and I usually walk away feeling enriched from learning something new. It’s such a shame that the same level of care and time hasn’t been put into developing the app therefore. I was hoping to make it a daily habit to watch a talk a day in the mornings but the app is barely functional. It’s takes a few minutes to load and then either freezes or crashes shortly after. On the occasions I manage to get to my likes videos or list, it again freezes or crashes. I have managed to watch some videos, but the controls don’t respond or respond literally minutes after you tapped the screen to pause, and then crashes again. A quality control function on the video player might help deal with this. PLEASE FIX THIS TED, it’s such a shame to have everything else you do ruined but poor app maintenance. It puts users off wanting to use your experience all together!!!