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."

Comments

No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

The old interface was fine, the new one is slow and is not sortable.

Re:No surprise there

[24-bit Voxel]

Agreed. Now I have to wait for the sideways scroll and it's all movies I've already seen. There are less icons on the screen so therefore fewer results and they scroll slower so it's doubly bad.

Re:No surprise there

[immaterial]

The scroll really is atrocious. You used to click the "next" arrow and it would quickly scroll in and entire new row. Now you have to hover the mouse over one end or the other (no visual feedback on that, even) and it will begin to slowly scroll them by, at a rate of less than one movie per second. To scroll through thirty movies used to take maybe five seconds, and now it takes upwards of thirty. For those who say, "Users always hate change!", I am a person who welcomes a new and improved interface, but this is out-and-out, unequivocally less useful and more time consuming to use than the old interface. How anyone thought it was a good idea is beyond me.

Re:No surprise there

[immaterial]

Search is great, when you know what you're looking for. If I want to look through the latest TV or movies they've added, it has to be no faster than 1 per second; the "see all" button doesn't exist, and there's no way to get a sortable list. If I want to browse through and find movies with good ratings - well, in addition to the slow-as-molasses scrolling, I can't see the ratings for the movies either unless I hover the mouse over each one one at a time!

Re:No surprise there

[Xtifr]

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.

Netflix API

[Hatta]

What Netflix really ought to do is publish an API and let people make their own interfaces.

Re:Netflix API

[h4rr4r]

This a million times this.
And please give a FREE and open method of playing it. I want to make my own view and have it work on any device.

Re:Netflix API

[kwerle]

You are being facetious, right?

I'm part way through writing my own interface that will let multiple users view their queues and juggle between them (so that people in the same household can manage each other's queues and see/set both people's ratings at the same time).

They just want to sell the mouse over info

[PotatoHead]

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?

Re:They just want to sell the mouse over info

[Bieeanda]

Netflix doesn't just buy a thousand copies of a movie, rip it to a streamable format, and send it to the end-user. They license titles for streaming, and that means keeping a positive relationship with their suppliers, the movie companies. They've consistently said 'no' to a 'buy this movie' button, but that doesn't mean that they really can or should resist every other offer that their suppliers make.

This article indicates that Netflix is happy to play with media companies in order to smooth ruffled feathers. A primary UI redesign that basically turns it into a marquee of movie posters, that probably feeds interaction metrics back, and definitely showcases individual titles more effectively, seems a logical decision from that standpoint. Whether or not the users are going to stand for a radical redesign like that is another question entirely.

Re:Breaking story

[artor3]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[h4rr4r]

There are only so many hockey and maple syrup documentaries available.

Another example of form over function

[mfearby]

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.

Re:Another example of form over function

[vitaflo]

Having been a web designer for the better part of 15 years I think you should be careful when you lump designers into taking the blame for this. In doing so you give them way to much power.

Any real designer would consider the new Netflix site an abomination. It sucks for the reasons everyone knows it sucks. But if you've ever actually done design work you would know that these sorts of sites rarely are the brain child of a typical web designer. These horrible UI decisions are usually the result of many layers of bureaucracy inside a company, with middle managers inevitably deciding on their own pet ideas and influencing design ("Ohh bigger images, bigger!", "Hover scrolls! Those would be cool and fun!").

In fact, the hardest part of being a designer isn't design. That's not particularly difficult. No, it's the fact that design to most people is subjective and thus everyone feels the need to want to add their own bits and pieces into a design, even when they make no sense and are horrible ideas. This is why so much of design education is learning about critique, because inevitably, someone will want to add amazingly bad ideas to an otherwise decent UI and you need to learn how to argue for (or against) your ideas.

What this design says to me is that Netflix may have just gotten too big for its own good. Marketers and managers seem to be having way too much say on the user experience of the website. This happens to all big companies eventually, it's just unfortunate that Netflix has finally crossed that line.

Re:Breaking story

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A very bad trend in online interfaces.

[webdog314]

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.

Re:I hate Netflix.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Generic developer response to upset users

[artor3]

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!

Actual Story

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:Breaking story

[tverbeek]

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.