I'm an amateur web designer myself and the new site is absolute garbage. It looks like some interface designer's wet dream but functionally speaking is practically useless. Users generally balk at change but this is a case where the new thing is genuinely worse.
Yea I've noticed that. That's rather inconvienient for anyone who has a lap top or a PC. Like you said. Now we have to wait forever for the stupid page to load, due to the redesigners... HUGE mistake.
Well, the Netflix blog hit it's 5000th comment, which means it reached max capacity. Not bad for 5 days. Last I checked, they've received: 5000 comments on the official Netflix blog. 12,000 tweets (as of the other day). In the words of the rep I was talking to, "constant" phone calls complaining about the interface. I'm curious to see what they do. They're in too precarious a position to simply ignore paying members. Of course, it would happen with all those Star Trek releases coming up.
^ Yep. Talk about foot-in-mouth! You don't go around openly telling your customers that they're wrong, and that they don't know what they like. It's just bad business.
Ahh, the old clueless, people like the change response! It may be cleaner, but it's not easier. In fact, most people would likely say it's harder to use because the information isn't immediately available to the eyes. Perhaps they should do some more research and find out why people dislike the change. In other words, it's one way of saying they won't change back because they've spent too much money on this design. I wonder if any of the people who've tested it complained about usability.
^Well, I'm sure they did. But he also says that the "vast majority" of their test subject liked it. I'm not a big fan of the new interface, but I think it's an overstatement to say that Netflix didn't do significant usability and user testing. The question may be, "did they test the right things?" Steve Swasey could also use a little help in the "communication" department.
Well, maybe so. But I think the importance of usability in web design is rather understated in general these days. Just seeing that page for instance is enough to tell me that they dropped a big heavy ball on their toes, bigtime. I think a better question would be, that yes, it's cleaner, but is that necessarily a good thing? If it removes key usability features that people rely on to make the site work, I don't see that as a good thing. It's rather a bad thing to have people struggle with something and get frustrated as it's more likely people will stop using a service. Also as far as test subjects go, we don't know how many people got to test it and it might be a small number also told to test specific things, or people that just tend to go with the flow and put up with it.
I see that every so often, not sure why it happens or on what schedule. It's like three card monte! It gives you three blank cards supposedly based on whatever movie you returned most recently and you turn them over by clicking them to see the recommendations, which I never find useful. This place is a better source of movie news, by far.
Hehe. Anyone wanna guess if this redesign was done by the same people that screwed up Gawker Media's websites? Thank god Gawker finally gave the option for "blog view" (like the old layout). I would be curious to see statistics as to how many people use the sites in blog view as opposed to the new site format.
I'm not certain what kind of focus group would think it's a good idea to remove sorting options... I used to be able to see the movies in a list format and sort by date or rating or what have you. Unless I'm missing something, I can't do that anymore and it's obnoxious.
I've seen some places on the web saying that less than 10% of users used that ability on the site, and that part of this redisign was removing unused and under used features to simplify the site's database.
I don't see a problem with this. After all, we know that two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.