Recently at Mix, I ran into a couple of UI folks from Netflix. We got into a over dinner conversation where we talked about some of the UI issues with their service. They asked at the end of dinner if I’d care to write a critique of the site. We conducted a brainstorm with about 8 Artefact people (all Netflix users) for a couple of hours and generated a list of maybe 30 big and small issues and opportunities for Netflix and their site. I wrote up the notes, then was about to hit Send when the Netflix team did a fairly significant update to their site rendering allot of the issues redundant. It took a week or two to re-do this list and Kudos to the Netflix team their site dramatically improved in this release. Overall their site UI is pretty good, we rate it an overall B, but there’s lots of small and large opportunities for them to make the Netflix site the best Movie authority destination on the internet. The picture above shows a concept featuring a movie preview on the home page, with the ability filter in the individual movie bands.
Once we sent the document, Netflix immediately responded with some very nice feedback answering many of the issues this document raises. They asked I keep thier feedback confidential. You can read the document here.