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Another anecdote: I’d have cancelled Netflix a while ago if my family wasn’t using it. Their UX has been on a steady decline for me: - Audio previews make it s

• Crisco 8y ago
  I've shared a lot of your issues with Netflix as well, and I don't think it's nitpicky to want to watch Narcos without any subtitles. I feel like especially for that show where it really tried to capture the feeling of Colombia watching it and having to read half dialogue takes away from my enjoyment.
• unethical_ban 8y ago
  Audio previews! Holy shit! Terrible experience. And auto-play for episodes. I know it gets people hooked to watch, but still annoying. There are so few configurable items in their Netflix menu.
  • geoffmcc 8y ago
    I have noticed lately that the "Are you still there" message has gone away. While it is nice when you are awake, it sucks when you fall asleep and wake up on season 6 of something when last you knew you were on season 2. Then you have to figure out exactly what episode you fell asleep on, not impossible but can be a pain.
    • pasbesoin 8y ago
      You can turn off "play next episode" in the web page based interface. Or, you could. I turned it off a while ago, and that change still works for me.
    • __david__ 8y ago
      I turned off the auto-episode advance just for this reason. When I'm awake it's a perfect feature but when I'm asleep it's a total misfeature.
    • heavenlyblue 8y ago
      Hate that option. I tend to work from home and leave my TV with something on. Picking up my remote every few hours is a waste. I don’t see why it’s so hard to let users turn it off.
      • sieabahlpark 8y ago
        I think your arm could deal with the pain every few hours.
    • codebje 8y ago
      Netflix carries a decent selection of kid's entertainment, where having a 10-minute show followed by the next episode automatically is useful. On the Apple TV app, at least, the "Are you still watching" message is still there.
      • xevb3k 8y ago
        I don’t find this useful. I really just want for my kids to watch one episode and then we can decide if we want to do something else. I also find it infuriating that when we watch a kids film, your immediately shown a preview for another film during the credits. I get it, but I wish there was an option to turn them off.
    • gregmac 8y ago
      You can turn off auto play of the next episode. It both saves your sanity and avoids that problem.
  • lozenge 8y ago
    What's going to happen when Originals directors realise and make the first 10 minutes much more compelling than the rest, by making it unrepresentative of what the show actually is? Hmm, I might already have experienced that...
• Gustomaximus 8y ago
  I'd add to this their removal of star ranking and that percentage system. It's so geared to what they want to promote vs what is good TV.
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    I honestly don't care about what ranking they use as it gives good results. Thumbs up, 5 starts, 10 starts, %, it's all the same. What frustrates me is that even after changing it, the recommendations are still just as bad, so the whole change was basically pointless.
    • bunderbunder 8y ago
      The recs were very good back when it was the DVD service. Wild conjecture: A paucity of things to recommend, combined with a desire to not concede that there are only like 3 things left I haven't watched yet but would be likely to give 5 stars, prompted them to first tweak the recommender's calibration, then eventually to wholesale switch to a metric that blurs the distinction between, "Yeah, I'll watch it", and "That was great!"
      • derefr 8y ago
        My guess is that they’re using variable-scheduled rewards: they’ll recommend you a bunch of shows they know you’d only give 3-4 stars, and “hold back” a 5 star show, surfacing it at some random set time since the last time they gave you something good. Such a strategy would get you more addicted, but also allow them to stretch their supply of subjectively-five-star-rated shows at the same time. It’s win-win ...for them.
        • bunderbunder 8y ago
          In my case, I think it's even more stark: I've definitely wasted the odd hour hunting for something to watch, and, in the process, have become keenly aware of just how minuscule their library is right now. They're building it back up with their private content, but, quite understandably, only in some very focused areas - presumably, the stuff that they expect to have the widest appeal. They originally built their business on basically owning the long tail, but now they've been forced to forsake it. I think that's where a lot of the discontent is coming from. Folks are realizing that Netflix has turned into something very akin to the Blockbuster outlets that everyone had once cheered them for running out of town.
• nitwit005 8y ago
  You can always just give up on their UI. I've seen my friends open their phones to search for a show to watch instead of using the Netflix UI to find something. There are multiple sites with listings, which suggests this is a fairly common practice.
  • ehsankia 8y ago
    Yep, I always open Netflix, tell myself my show should be near and start scrolling, then give up and use the search. It's so so bad. Now with the audio previews, I just bookmark shows and go straight to there. Their UI is completely useless.
• whymauri 8y ago
  100% on the bilingual thing. For my family and I, it's kinda awkward - weird localization failure for such a large corp. Not to mention completely botched translations like the title of Money Heist (actually called The Paper House), which is the dumbest name I've ever seen.
  • Cyphase 8y ago
    I don't think they 'botched' the translation; I think they just thought the name would be more appealing.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Translations of movie titles are a pet peeve of mine. They are bad everywhere, and have been since way before the times of Internet streaming. My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
    • majewsky 8y ago
      I always love when English movie titles are translated for the German market into different-but-still-English movie titles. My favorite example is Zootopia, which got changed into Zoomania for the German market.
      • Grue3 8y ago
        Seems like Zootopie (Zoo + Utopie) would've worked just fine.
    • rinze 8y ago
      > My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking. Same. In Spanish that title was translated as "La Jungla de Cristal" (The Glass Jungle). There seems to be some common agreement here :D
• flukus 8y ago
  The problem with the UX of netflix, spotify, etc is that their tied to the service, they have a monopoly on that service. I should be able to watch content I've paid for through they player I want with the features I want and not be forced to use the netflix player. I just want a textual list of shows available, apparently this technology is beyond the abilities of the tech team at netflix. Autoplay is another pet peeve, I like the feature but if I fall asleep then netflix considers the show watched and removes it from my continue list. The worse it get's the more I'm tempted to go back to less legal means of acquiring content, then I can watch it in any player without an arbitrarily gimped resolution.
• da_chicken 8y ago
  I've started to get fatigue with the style of a lot of NetFlix shows. They're not just designed to be binged on, the plot only exists if you binge on it! Instead of having one plot every episode, most series seems to have one plot every season and then they draaaaaaaw that shit out like it's you're last Christmas cookie before the New Years' diet.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Yup. After being burned on this, I avoid Netflix-made shows altogether. I love binging interesting shows. I hate being dragged into binging by some screnwriting dark patterns.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    I don't get your complaint, season-long plots have always been common (outside of comedy shows). That's why the cliffhanger trope worked!
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Season-long plots are awesome, I personally much prefer shows with a long story arc than ones in which episodes can be watched in any order. The complaint here is different though. Netflix-made shows seem to be deliberately designed so that all plot subpoints get dragged through the entire season. Each episode will introduce something, later episodes will occasionally remind you of it, but you have to wait 'till the very end for everything to be simultaneously resolved. Basically, what would be a classical story arc gets stretched in a way that 90% of its mass falls into the last episode. (And then the resolution turns out to be meh, and you end up wondering why did you just waste 10 hours of your life on this show. It's quite like modern journalism - a bit of clickbait at the beginning, then a long article giving exactly zero useful information, and then a meaningless conclusion at the end.)
      • lozenge 8y ago
        What shows are you thinking of?
• Spooky23 8y ago
  I share your observations, but wanted to add the their browsing system is just bonkers. Discovery is impossible — imo they overoptimize for engagement and make it hard to explore the catalog. I find out about many new shows via PR placements in newspapers.
  • natas_claus 8y ago
    Try one of the standalone discovery sites. These improve this aspect a lot. I'm using Flixboss (https://flixboss.com https://flixboss.com).
    • fifnir 8y ago
      Does this deal with Netflix in other countries? I'd just like a big table of everything available with meta-data in columns and the ability to hide rows
      • prades 8y ago
        Flixbox is USA only, but there are some websites like unogs.com who can handle more countries. In addition to a more convenient browsing of the catalog, if you also want an alternative recommendation system (with really accurate and unbiased predicted ratings), there's the Windows/Mac app Coollector Movie Database: https://www.coollector.com/ https://www.coollector.com/
  • scrooched_moose 8y ago
    I was completely out of stuff to watch about a month ago. No matter what I did I could only get the same ~100 shows and movies that I'd either already watched or had no interest in. On a whim I switched over to my step father's profile - holy shit! There were at least 15 movies I wanted to watch that I absolutely could not get to show up on my profile without searching by name. I found a handful more on other family member's as well. If we weren't on a 5 person family plan I would have cancelled long ago because from what they will show me there isn't any to watch.
    • 8y ago
• alister 8y ago
  > no way to turn off captions for some of their shows There are all sorts of inconsistencies with subtitles and dubbing. For example, suppose a show has options for 5 languages, but not Portuguese. If you switch your profile to Portuguese (i.e., by logging to the Netflix website and selecting Portuguese as your main language), then lo and behold Portuguese appears as a choice for subtitles and audio for many shows where it wasn't offered before. Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match. They are both correct translations, but it's as if they were translated by entirely different people. Maybe Netflix gets the subtitling done by one agency, and then later, if there's enough demand for the show, they get dubbing done by another agency (but don't update the subtitles to match the new translation). Yet another oddity is that, on rare occasion, they will take away a language choice they offered for a show. A show might have, say, Polish as a audio option, but the next day it's gone. Completely puzzling.
  • baddox 8y ago
    English subtitles often don’t match the spoken dialogue for shows in English either. They are often simplified, probably for space and time constraints. I assume that the primary intended audience is the hearing impaired, not language learners.
  • learnstats2 8y ago
    >Another irritation when trying to learn a foreign language is that foreign subtitles and the foreign audio often don't match. This is industry standard, not specific to Netflix: - subs are generally direct translations of the script/transcript - dubs are often done by mouth-movement matching to make it look right I would agree that the language tools on Netflix are unnecessarily bad.
• reificator 8y ago
  > I’ve talked to some of their UX designers, and data seems to rule all there, so they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if it didn’t help them. They wouldn't be doing what they're doing if it didn't help them in the short term. Data is great but you never have a perfect picture. What boosts your numbers in the short term could be the thing that makes your customers resent you and move on in the long term.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also, some things are not easy to track. How would they track "there’s no way to turn off captions for some of their shows"? They see an user watching a show. The data does not show that this user is slightly pissed because they can't turn off captions, but they still care about the show so much that they watch anyway. "You make what you measure" cuts both ways.
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > data seems to rule all there Data is only part of the equation. The other part is what you look at, and yet another is what you aim for. The data might tell them that bilingual users are not being properly accommodated by the service (or may not tell that - after all, in what way are you giving this feedback that would also show up on Netflix's surveillance panels?) - but then the business people will say that already subscribed users are less important than getting new subscriptions, and this problem will have to wait. EDIT: > Their UX has been on a steady decline for me Agreed. It's less clear, and it seems to be optimized for Internet equivalent of channel hopping. For people who know exactly what they're searching for, Netflix becomes more and more difficult to use. Also - and this really annoys me - their UI changes tend to make the interface heavier each iteration. It's not a problem when I use it on my desktop, but then sometimes I'd like to watch a movie on a tablet (e.g. when in a hotel), and then I have to face the absolutely ridiculous situation, in which a full-HD movie seems to cause smaller load on my device than the interface to select what to watch.