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Netflix's New Web Interface Gets Thumbs Down From Users
Verdatum writes "Entertainment Weekly is one of many sites reporting the strong negative reaction from users of the new Netflix web interface. The new interface presents larger title images at the cost of visible ratings and the 'Sortable List' view. To see a suggested rating or view details, one must now first hover over each individual title.
Netflix announced the new interface on Wednesday, in an official blog post. So far, the post has received thousands of negative comments, but only a few dozen comments by users believing the change is an improvement."
and have some control over exposure.
Not sortable means you have to see more titles before you select one. For the person looking for a title that's bad. For the people wanting their title to be seen, and to know if there was interest in it, the new UI makes perfect sense.
How much do you want to bet they just log the mouse overs, seeing what people wanted to get detail on?
Blogging because I can...
This is legitimately a bad change. In addition to hiding the movie's ratings, they also hide the title, which isn't always clear from the picture. And the pictures are so big that on smaller monitors you can only see three at a time. And there's no button to scroll within a genre - you have to hover your mouse near the edge, revealing one new movie every second or so. It takes *much* longer to find something to watch, and the only benefit is that the pictures are a bit bigger.
Why scroll when you can search?
To discover new, interesting stuff, or stumble across stuff you'd forgotten about. Yeah, if you always know exactly what you want to watch or add to your queue in advance, then the new interface is no problem, but I like exploring, and they've seriously messed that up. Probably 80% of my Netflix use comes from stuff I randomly stumbled across; the stuff I really really care about, I probably already saw in the theater or own.
No, there's an actual story here, and someday when some business major is assigned "Netflix" as the topic for a research paper, I'm pretty sure they'll reach the same conclusion I'm about to predict: Netflix was already doomed at this point.
This new UI has a dozen things wrong with it. Nothing bad enough to sink the company, nothing that can't be fixed. But it's poorly designed and poorly implemented. I can pick them out, and I don't even do this for a living. What this tells you is that Netflix isn't hiring people who really grok User Interfaces. They aren't incompetent; they just aren't very good. That by itself is a warning sign.
But the clincher comes from the PR hack's response, saying that they tested this new UI and got really good reception to it, etc. First, there's the fact that they have a PR hack who thinks that this is a good way to to damage control: by telling the customers that what they're thinking and feeling is wrong. Again, just not very good at his job. Second, let's take him at his word and accept that their testing didn't anticipate this negative reaction. What that tells you is that they don't know how to do testing either. If there are enough users who dislike it this much, professionals who know how to do testing (hint: the testing team should include none of the people who did the design or coding) would have turned it up. Finally, we have someone in management whose reaction to these mistakes is not to 1) hire better UI people, 2) do UI testing better, but to circle the wagons and refuse to even admit that "mistakes were made". Probably the Director of Web Site Experience or some title like that needs to be sacked, but they aren't going to do that. Because that would mean admitting that hiring said person was a mistake.
Netflix is doing great right now, because they're riding the wave of a new entertainment delivery model. They are making enough money that even people who are not very good at their jobs (see current company roster) can continue operating the company profitably. But that won't last forever. Which means that, when the competition gets rough, when another business model challenges the company, or whatever else happens that requires Netflix to start doing things smarter and better.... the people in charge at every level of the company will be the people who brought you (and defended) this rather crappy UI change.
And they're gonna get clobbered.
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