Comments on: Netflix Queue Management

By: Amir

Amir — Fri, 26 May 2006 17:36:11 +0000

This new interface is an example of gratuitous misuse of AJAX. The new interfaces is much less usable than the old one and has dented my image of the Netflix brand. I was bemused to find this interface foisted on me. Poor show.

By: EricIsDeliriou5

EricIsDeliriou5 — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:05:28 +0000

The lightbox feature works just fine on my 2 year old Dell D600 with 1Gig RAM running FF1.5, but from a UX perspective I really like the new interface. Previously adding a new title to the queue would always navigate the user away from the current page, and if you were already on a page with a list of movies that you were still exploring, you might not want to be forced to navigate away. I think a grand thing to offer would be a user configurable option to either show the recommendations lightbox after adding to your queue, or possibly using a much smaller lightbox that simply alerts you that the movie was successfully added to your queue with possibly a couple of small links to navigate to the recommendations page or to your queue. Now the thing that I still find ah interesting carry-over into the recommendations lightbox is that the recommendation results still show movies that you have already seen and rated… why? Netflix has obviously done a lot of work from a technology perspective, and obviously considered their customer’s actions in the design decisions, but there is still more UX work that could be done (for example, displaying the friend icon on movies in a list that my friends have seen and rated is great, but it really stinks to have to click on the link to go to the individual movie page to see what rating & comments my friends made). Well, here’s to Netflix and whatever is next in my Queue!

By: Rebort

Rebort — Tue, 23 May 2006 20:12:30 +0000

This is one of the more over-indulgent uses of ajax out there. It runs slowly on older systems. It essentially loads an entire page’s worth of content on top of another page, which defeats one of the basic purposes behind using the technology at all.

They had another bit of ajax in there before — now gone, unfortunately — which allows you to add a movie and reorder the top of your queue via click and drag from the confirmation page.

I don’t know why Netflix wants to get fatter and heavier. The site should be about navigation and usability. People go there to order DVDs and then leave. All the whiz-bang just interferes with fufilling the site’s basic purpose.

By: ctran

ctran — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:12:30 +0000

I totally hate the interface! It interferes more than helping: I just want to be able to quickly add one movie then move on to another, don’t make me wait for something I’m not interested in!!!

By: Terry Schmitt

Terry Schmitt — Tue, 23 May 2006 16:40:14 +0000

Hey, that’s pretty neat. I disliked that they always took you away from where you were. Works fast and clean on Windows2000/FF1.5/1.2GB/1.8GHz.
The fade works cleanly.

By: anders

anders — Tue, 23 May 2006 15:51:58 +0000

It’s cool, but it absolutely kills my browser (FF1.5/Linux on a 2.6GHz machine with 2GB RAM). When the popup appears or disappears, it takes it about 45 seconds for it to fade in or out line by line, with the CPU pegged the whole time and the browser completely unusable for the duration.