Netflix's New Web Interface Gets Thumbs Down From Users 267
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."
Wasn't that bad (Score:2, Interesting)
I used it today. It wasn't that bad, but I didn't really see the need to change from the previous interface.
They just want to sell the mouse over info (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Breaking story (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not as bad as the game console version (Score:4, Interesting)
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'!
Re:No surprise there (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Actual Story (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.