Totally Agree! The Tenuous Future, Mediocre Design, and Negligible Payouts of Netflix - NoFilmSchool

For its future as a streaming only service, Netflix is reliant on deals with content owners, a situation which has the service being described aptly as a castle on quicksand. As evidence of its constantly-changing library, Netflix recently lost Starz content but today added Dreamworks Animation films to their library. However, Amazon also doubled their Prime library today (which at $79/year — including an unlimited free two-day shipping tie-in — compares favorably to Netflix’s $96 annual fee). Competition is heating up, but I can’t help but note one other thing about Netflix: the design of their website and most of their apps is, and always has been, mediocre at best. Which is to say nothing of the connection between the service’s benefit to consumers and its detriment to content creators.

via nofilmschool.com

Excerpt from an original post on nofilmschool.com - I so agree with this - the interface design on Netflix is atrocious:

"Despite the fact that Netflix reportedly split-tests many different designs and only uses the best one, I’ve always thought that their user experience is just a tad short of atrocious. They killed their community many moons ago (remember having “friends” on Netflix?) and have not replaced it since. Other than a basically useless Top 100, they don’t even let you see what’s popular, and every new iteration seems to get worse. The recently redesigned homepage is exactly what you try to avoid as a web designer: a “brick wall.” A brick wall is a bunch of blocks in a grid that forces the user to choose between a ton of options, without clearly prioritizing any of them. A screenshot of my Netflix homepage — which seems to misinterpret this design faux pas as a good thing — is at right. I’m not saying I’m the best designer in the world, but I was a Senior Designer at MTV in a past life. So after many years of being a Netflix customer, stumbling on the following web site was a godsend...."

Read the full smart post:

http://nofilmschool.com/2011/09/tenuous-future-mediocre-design-negligible/

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