TED 12+

Great App, Great Content!

Recently I have had a minor addiction to video games during covid because of the scarce amount of activity in my life. This addiction was starting to grow, with accumulating many games on my mobile device, and a gaming console. When I wanted to accumulate another mobile device game, I found a section of apps, with TED within this group of applications. Therefore, I downloaded TED. Although I had a minor video game addiction, i still read books, and watched documentaries. However, while I downloaded TED I broke this minor addiction before it grew and spent more time to invest in education and learning rather than a video game that contributes only entertainment to my life. I love TED because with great quality in learning, there is not much quantity of time consumed! Therefore I could watch many more “mini documentaries” as so I say, than other documentaries. Thank you for your time, and last note. If you are wanting to learn more, I definitely 1,000% recommend this application.

Great Content — Very Poor App

The poor rating is for the new app, that forces me to answer filtering questions and queues up videos to auto start after I finish a video. I have used the TED app since it came out on my first iPhone, years ago. What I most appreciated was the chaotic combination of topics that were always showing up, with no theme holding them together other than combining Technology, Entertainment, and Design. What I valued most was the juxtaposition of wildly differing topics — I don’t want filtering and categorization and I don’t want a TED account, I just want the flood of wildly different topics that characterized the experience in the past. Please provide a way to bypass the filter questions and categorized presentations and just go back to the timeline presentation of topics as they are added to the flow. On top of sticking questions I don’t want to answer in the flow of using the app, at a recent update it lost the results and made me answer them again. Bad programming producing a poor user experience. I was about to give two stars, since that is all the app should get, but it is hard to ignore the fact that the content is still very high quality.

Developer Response ,

Thank you very much for your candid feedback.

With regard to signing in on the app, it's actually already possible to bypass it. After answering the TED Recommends questions, you can choose "Skip this" on the login screen to use the app without an account. That said, your watch history, saved talks and favorites will be vulnerable to loss if you change devices or delete the app. We encourage signing in to an account to allow the carryover of saved data between devices or syncing across platforms.

As you note, the "infinite scroll" feed that showed all recent talks has been revamped in the new version to better align with the "homepage" of the app with the homepage of TED.com. Our rationale is to make our content "ribbons" identical on all platforms. This is also partly meant to balance the viewing options for viewers who are more inclined to want content recommended to them, or surfaced based on certain interests. For more adventurous viewers like you, the most recent 12 talks appear in reverse chronological order in the Newest Talks ribbon, and the Surprise Me feature will generate a random talk to perhaps satisfy your desire to see a wildly differing topic each time.

With that said, forthcoming releases will have many enhancements to how content will be shown in the app, including a holistic library to make random browsing more easy. Thank you again for your feedback!

Covid 19 and black lives matter

After I retired five years ago, I enjoyed looking at TED daily for the variety of coverage. Sometimes I scanned my own interests art, architecture and design just to see what others were doing. I titled this these two areas of concern because I appreciated the thoughtful coverage. My grandson who is 21 challenged me to find a group to discuss TED ideas with. Beyond my partner and my church and book club groups. As a teacher I led Socratic discussion, teaching students how to voice their own understanding and listen to others, even if I had to do so during our lunch breaks. I worked with 3rd through 6th grade. TED talks have given me more insight into the importance of discussion and ways of facilitating it effectively. Thank you for the ideas, the vision, and the hope for our future.