Slashdot Mirror
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."
The old interface was fine, the new one is slow and is not sortable.
Yeah, nothing new with that. The same thing always happens with Facebook and even more so with slashdot. There's huge outcry on slashdot always when the interface changes. Then it goes over and like now, everything is good.
I used it today. It wasn't that bad, but I didn't really see the need to change from the previous interface.
What Netflix really ought to do is publish an API and let people make their own interfaces.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The new interface of /. is still less usable than the previous iteration(s). It was one reason why a significant blogging community fractured and departed a few years back, along with reliability issues and the easily abused moderation system.
This entire thread seems to be just an excuse for developers to pay no attention to usability issues. As usual.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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...
A lot of web sites that have tuned their main (and other) pages over time to be usable and accessible, often seem to think that a major change is "improvement". Sometimes it is, but often it isn't simply because they don't spend enough energy on validating functionality and usability with their users. Having a "try new interface" or "use old interface" options would help so that people can try out the new look, yet go back to the old one if the new interface doesn't work for them. Then, requesting active feedback from users will help them to make sure that all is working as they wish before deprecating the old interfaces. Like customers, the users are always right. New eye candy may not be what you need to be successful.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
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.
There are only so many hockey and maple syrup documentaries available.
The bandwidth usage has exploded on our network, and the two biggest culprits are Netflix and MLB.TV. We are considering requiring users who are detected using these services to have to subscribe to the highest service tier, or have those services blocked.
So, when you hear the words "net neutrality" do you immediately cover your ears and go "nyah nyah nah nah nah I can't Hear YOU!" at the top of your lungs, or do you simply catch fire and disintegrate like the vampires in the Blade movies? It's a serious question: inquiring minds want to know.
Remind me never, ever to order services from your company. Under any conditions. Whatsoever. Two things you should understand: a. sometimes you have to spend money to make money and b. the overriding need to "improve shareholder value at all costs" will not make a good defense when we come for you.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This disease of making something a designer's wet dream at the expense of actual usability is becoming more and more widespread. It needs to stop! The same can be said of Unity or GNOME 3. Sure, taken as a stand-alone GUI art installation, it might turn some heads and get a few people excited, but if you have to use the darn thing for more than an hour, its inadequacy outshines the shiny!
The ultimate arbiter of whether a design or a change is a good thing should be whether or not you've increased the number of clicks/hovers/steps that a user has to go through to achieve the same task. If so, then bin it and start again. Sorry, but fancy interfaces won't win anybody over if you're pissed off simply having to use it. Just like a trophy bride, she might look nice, but eventually the nagging turns you right off.
Someone has already posted an extension for chrome that fixes the layout. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngacmlmclfopgbnmefcffgbcjiafbfpo?hl=en-US#
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
Netflix claimed they tested it, but who was in the test group? I never heard they were working on a new interface. There was no "check out the new interface demo". Nothing. It is freaking hideous. Clumsy, bulky, slow. I think they're lying about the testing. If they would have really tested that monstrosity it would have failed miserably.
I thought about down-grading my subscription for a month in protest.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I agree however I kept forcing slashdot to revert to the old interface(it was hidden but still in there)
right up until the last update. it was gone. I then got an email from slashdot why i kept switching back. I broke down the new interface and it's problems/ successes in a fairly detailed email on usability.
I finished up with something along the lines of the new developers seem never to have actually used slashdot before why would they understand how it works.
Right now I am using a hybrid interface, a lot of ajaxy parts, but moderating, comment sort, all look familiar. It works fairly well.
The only part I miss of the new designs was the instant moderating. no scrolling to the bottom of the screen to press the moderate button.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This link works ok for now if you want the most of the older interface (hover is broke)
http://www.netflix.com/WiHome?fcld=true
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The problem with Netflix in Canada is that you can get only the online stuff (not the mailers), but both kinds are displayed, so when you see an interesting movie, you click then it says: sorry it is not available online. It's like Amazon a while ago when it was not possible to filter out the stuff that is out of stock. Very annoying.
lucm, indeed.
Just tried it out; the scrolling is awkward and annoying, but aside from that I don't see much to complain about. At least, not compared to the disimprovements they just added to the game console player (at least on the PS3), which is just horrible!
On the console, they used to have a hierarchy--you could go to a genre (e.g. Horror), then drill down to see various subcategories (New Releases, Zombie movies, B-Horror, Slashers and Serial Killers, etc.). That's all been replaced with a flat grid, where each row represents a single genre. This is particularly annoying with the psuedo-genres, "Independent" and "Foreign", each of which was subdivided into actual genres (Independent Comedy, Foreign Science Fiction), which were sometimes subdivided further (Independent Romantic Comedies, Japanese Science Fiction). Now all the indie and foreign films are in one big shapeless, useless pile. And it's a much smaller pile, which brings me to complaint two:
With the old, tree-structured interface, each sub-category (or sub-sub-category) could have up to a couple of hundred films to browse. There was a fair amount of overlap between sub-categories, but even so, this meant you could have well over a thousand films available in each category. Now, each main category seems to be limited to 75 movies max!
One slightly more minor disimprovement: they changed the layout so that slightly less room is available for descriptions. Most of their descriptions are still short enough to fit anyway, and some were too long even with the older layout, but there's definitely more that don't fit now.
Compared to all that, what they did to the web page is nuttin'!
It also may mean that the change actually made the site worse.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Users hate having useful features removed from the front page. Before this change, the first thing on the front page when I logged in was "recently watched," which allowed me to instantly jump to the next episode of whatever series I was watching before. Completely gone now, I need to search to figure out where I was at. Freaking stupid.
Please, the video playback performance on it seems even worse than Flash if that's even possible.
(3 year old desktop system)
It seems that web interfaces are simply doing away with the "click". It's as if designers were told "fewer clicks is better", and so they naturally thought that NO clicks must be best. I freaking HATE rollover interfaces. If I want to see the details, then I can avail myself to lightly depress my mouse button a millimeter or two. Otherwise, keep it the hell out of my face.
This new Netflix interface sucks.
This reminds me of the Digg 4 redesign. Why change something that isn't broken in the first place and turn it into complete crap in the process? I sincerely hope Netflix actually accepts the negative criticism and tries to fix it instead of thinking it knows better than its users.
Streaming hundreds of megabits of video across a public network, when a simple trip to the corner video store to rent a DVD results in a better picture and 5.1 surround sound just makes no sense.
And it never will if short-sighted people like you have anything to say about it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The bandwidth usage has exploded on our network, and the two biggest culprits are Netflix and MLB.TV. We are considering requiring users who are detected using these services to have to subscribe to the highest service tier, or have those services blocked.
So what service are these people paying you for? Are they paying for an advertised known limited bandwidth service and then going over their limit? If that is the case then why not cut them off when they reach their cap??
Or are you just offering them "Internet" service. Then when they actually "USE" it, your panties get in a bunch?
Users also hate removed features...
Titles of movies removed (hopefully it is big enough on the picture). Seen it already, removed. Rated already, buried. Extra clicks to see reviews. Extra clicks to see star level. Slow scrolling compared to before. The ability to sort is buried somewhere or just gone.
This is a step backwards in usability. It *looks* cooler. It has the possibility to be better. But needs the above features back in. Classic case of form over function.
Oh and dont accidentally click on a movie. Starts it instantly. If you want to watch it or not (I have already done this at least 4 times).
More like someone bought an iPhone and thought it was the best interface ever. Missing the fact they had a very good organically grown one. The old one took only a couple of mins fiddling around to see how it worked. This new one, not so much...
Clearly, users should just shut up and be grateful that developers know what's best for them, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I am better than everyone else, so whatever just got posted I must disagree with! I will throw out some random cliche assumed to be true, and will ignore any actual factual information about the specific case at hand!
I worked for weeks on this update! It is clearly superior to version n-1, and even though it lacks some of n-1's features, nobody was using them anyway. What, you say you were using those? Every day? Well, then, you're using my program wrong! Besides, the new features in version n more than make up for any inconvenience. You say that the new features don't work in your os/browser? Impossible, I tested this update for almost a whole day!
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I didn't notice a change at first, since anyone with a PS3 who has seen the UI it's been using for the last few months should immediately recognize the new design. It actually works pretty well on the PS3, since you can use your controller to navigate it decently quickly. With a mouse, however, the rollovers are comically slow, and the lack of visible ratings (Netflix's strong suit) is a massive oversight. But, the fact that this UI has been in use on the PS3 for months may be why Netflix says they've been testing the UI for an extended period of time without major complaint.
The other reason I didn't notice any change was because I keep my bookmark on my computer set to the Instant Queue. Really, whenever I'm on my computer, I only ever see my queues, the detail pages for movies I'm watching, and the search results page after I look up something, none of which were redesigned. I'm not even sure why people use the rest of the site, though I'd guess I'm not the typical user.
Had it not been for this posting here, I'd likely have not seen the changes for months, and when I did see them, I likely wouldn't have even realized a change had occurred, since the UI would look familiar to me already.
That click-image-once-to-play behavior is the single biggest and stupidest mistake of this UI design. I'm really not the kind of person who calls for people to be fired, but I sincerely hope that the person who suggested it and the person who approved it both do some soul-searching and consider going into real estate or social work or construction, or some other career choice that they have a better aptitude for.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I hope they spend some time improving their gaming console interface.
Specifically:
- I don't even want to see genres I'm not interested in.
- I want a "not interested" option, like on the web interface
- I should be able to see a full list of things I've watched, so I can go back and continue to watch a series I started watching awhile ago.
- Should be able to apply a "not interested" rating to an entire series, across all seasons.
Also, why bother showing search results for titles I am not able to watch? Hoping a click on an unwatchable title at least triggers a hit so they can see demand for it.
Amen. The thing I used to love about slashdot was that it had some of the most insightful discussions on the internet, ones that were often times many levels deep in a comment thread. Now, since you can't see ratings on lots of nested comments until you click on them, you hardly ever see a decent comment thread more than two or three levels deep.
The latest slashdot redesign totally killed the experience for me, and it's most definitely not a case of "users hate change". Users hate when they have critical features taken away from them.
Okay, I've never used Usenet other than looking at some of the Google archived stuff. Which has an atrocious interface. What do you people think was so great about Usenet interfaces?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I'm an academic, and two of the websites I use a lot just did more or less the same thing. First, our university library decided they needed a new web presence. So the catalog system got a new page with search box. 98% of the page is irrelevant, and there's this little search box in the top left. Fine, at least it's there. Then your results come up on a page with 5 tabs. Only one tab actually does anything. The links are dead on all the rest of them. So, pick the right tab, click the link that's on it, then click one more link, again picking the right one out of a couple of dead ones, and you get..... The same old page you would get on the old system, except as the first result of your search. A similar thing happened to an online journal I frequent. It became prettier, or at least it came to conform to the present style. But finding old articles is more difficult. And all articles are now shoe-horned into 1/3 of the pages. The other 2/3s are reserved for distracting sidebars with links and pictures. They're NOT ads, but they fill exactly the same position in the layout as ads; I guess they're like self-promo ads. ANYWAY: what's driving all this? It's not like the sites being replaced are those early 90s things with web-ring GIFs at the bottom of the page. They were fairly clean, readable, USEFUL sites to navigate. Now they are not. Why the heck is this happening?
Could this, like so many other stupid web sites, have been designed by someone who doesn't actually USE the web for commerce? Someone who doesn't actually USE Netflix? What are we all too stupid to READ? I don't need big pictures, I want informative content! Another indication of the corporations viewing the 'public' as imbeciles who can't or won't read. Not the case; especially with folks who actually live and work on the Net and use it for most all purchases. Netflix, get it together. Don't underestimate your customer base or it will go somewhere else!
Skip Stein Free Agent Management Systems Consulting, Inc. http://www.msc-inc.net www.linkedin.com/in/skipstein
See also: s/Netflix/Slashdot/g