Mildly Infuriating

UI's for movie streaming services are not designed to help you find something to watch. They are designed to keep you "engaged", which means in the platform and not realizing that the pool of actually interesting things is about as deep as a puddle. Everything about streaming sites' design is user hostile and this is a classic example of that.

I'm so here for this.

It's genuinely infuriating to see a hundred years of movie poster art evolution discarded. It's the first part of a movie's artistic statement you ever see, and it gets summarily tossed in the trash so that Netflix's internal overworked engagement metrics team can spend 2 minutes grabbing random shots of different stars in the film, slap single-color generic font text all over it, and target twelve versions to different demographics to try to get more clicks.

It's even worse when I tell this to someone and they're like, "I don't really notice."

My local movie theater in the heart of downtown has taken down all the movie posters outside the entrance and replaced them with a single screen that only shows ads for overpriced popcorn "deals".

Before, anyone walking by knew which movies were currently playing; now, all they know is just how outrageously expensive the popcorn is.

I haven't been to that theater since.

Web/UI design in general has sucked for at least 14 years now. Everything is spaced too far apart and text/images are too big. Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words. Pointless animations and gradients slow everything down for no reason.

And make sure everything you mouseover trying to get a blurb or something instead just jumps around like a Jack Russell terrier trying to grab your attention. I fucking hate having to find a place to park my mouse so it isn't autoplaying some bullshit I have no interest in.

Everything about using the internet and its various “services” has turned to absolute garbage in the last 15 years.

It's all about driving metrics now. If people need to click on/select a movie to see more about it then that adds numbers to page views and increases time spent in the app. They can also see who and how many do or don't watch a movie after clicking on it to further drive their algorithms.

What difference are you seeing that I'm not?

It’s part of the infuriating trend on removing all words from UIs. God forbid the kids learn how to read a movie title. Using modern apps means navigating a never ending stream of hieroglyphs. The “save”, “load”, “new”, “share” buttons are long gone; replaced with an ever changing series of symbols.

Nope, you’re right, Joelle, this looks like hot stinky cat shit.

Fuck this design.

And then combined it with thumbnails that change all the time because of A/B testing, which makes things even harder to recognize at a glance.

I'm finding myself having to guide people through UIs that have random symbols instead of an obvious word that says what it does.

It's annoying and getting worse.

You can easily use a word button to point to a side out menu with words, all language localised, that will actually make sense to a user instead of causing a tech anxiety attack!

I shouldn't have to scout and translate a UI for someone. If there's one bright side to all the AI being pushed at users is that it's at least able to communicate with actual text, and usually wants to be user-friendly instead of hostile.

Click on a cover to get more info.

Honestly it feels a bit like browsing a shelf of books or DvD boxes or something. It certainly could have some improvements but I don’t think this is that bad.

The large cover design isn't even the worst bit, it's how hard it is to find concrete genre categories in a lot of these streaming apps. You'd have a bunch of overlapping categories like most popular whatever in whereever and so on, they quite literally hide the option to just go to movies -> genre -> list everything in some apps (Netflix was hard to find at some point).

Now I just pirate whatever old movies come to mind and stuff them in Jellyfin. Right now it's Minority Report. Up next... Hmm I downloaded man from U.N.C.L.E the other day, might watch that.

This along with the changes to de-emphasize things like watch lists or even "continue watching" is basically the providers seeing how much they can influence users to watch what the provider wants instead of trying to cater to the users. If they find that people rarely navigate away from whatever 'top 10' or 'for you' suggestions, well, that means they have a great deal of freedom to only provide what is convenient for them and still get most of their revenue.

I mean, if they could let you click on the picture and it "flips" over and then there's some info and a few stills from the movie... This was how Video Rental stores worked for years.

Yup. And when you click on that, it will probably start playing and not showing any information.

Social media told me gradeschoolers can't read now. I guess they don't want all those nonsense symbols everywhere.

Doesn't piss me off as much as media players that show you what happens in the next episode as it's loading

Even if this is to drive engagement by clicking on items to gauge interest and collect metrics, I still don't see how that's more important than simply counting views and making an interface that's simple and pleasurable to use. I guess maybe the lack of proper market competition would allow this? This would be enough for me to leave the platform. (I'm running Jellyfin anyway.)

You can watch any movie you want as long as it’s Mortal Kombat.

I didn't look at all the comments, but this is intentional. One of the streaming platforms (probably Netflix or Amazon) originally made an algorithm that tailors posters to the individual. It's the usual A/B testing psychological bullshit designed to maximize your likelihood of watching a movie.