Netflix PS3 upgrade is a big step backwards

Netflix is getting worse and worse. Apart from the fact that the service quality is degrading (frequent stops and poor image quality, and the new imposition of the limited number of devices that nobody had ever heard of before), they've just released a pointless user interface "upgrade" for the PS3 version that makes it considerably harder to use.

This screenshot shows four different Netflix layouts. We used to have the top right one. Now we have the bottom right one.

In detail:

• Instead of showing 25 films per page, they now show 8. You can only scroll through them 3 at a time instead of 5, so scrolling through lists is 50% slower. Since we have about 200 movies bookmarked, and each scroll takes about 3 seconds to perform, it takes several minutes to get through our list.
• They also removed the side menu allowing you to access different genres, and now you have to scroll through 15 pages of recommendations before you even get to the categories.
• Even worse, the categories are unordered and they removed the sub-genres, so you now have to scroll through *all* foreign movies (3 at a time) rather than being able to go for, say, French comedies. That means scrolling through 1500 movies instead of 50, which is simply unbearable.

In other words, it's now incredibly slow and inefficient to use, and I cannot see any benefit to the user in doing it this way. It's a typical case of an upgrade for the sake of it.

Looks like I'm not the only person who's fed up either. Here are some extracts from the PS3 forums.

I also hate the change. What I do now is use my PC to search Netflix, and then add anything that I'm interested in to my instant queue.

The new menu stinks! I've only had netflix for a week.The old menu that allowed you to browse thousands of titles in an endless amount of sub categories was awesome. It allowed me to see programming that I could never find with the stupid, useless,regressed, going backwards setup that is in place now.It is completely rediculous to have to browse titles on your pc then search them on your ps3.

OMG this new menu is on purpose! I signed up with Netflix a few days ago and i had a menu that i could drill down through genres and find exactly what i wanted, then at some point this afternoon it changed to this crap. I just got off the phone with customer service from netflix and the guy told me this was a change they made based on customers who preferred it. I told him it's terrible and that having to search on the laptop and then back to the PS3 is redundant and a waste of time.

I also find the menu change to be annoying, they took an awesome service and made it intolerable. I also must use my PC and set it in my instant queue, they need to fix it back.

I used to love Netflix. Now I'm finding myself questioning every day whether it's worth the hassle. I'm off to post a couple of formal complaints on their FB page:

New PS3 Layout

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6275848869&topic=16559

PS3 UI

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6275848869&topic=16301

In at the deep end

Learning's a weird thing. We all do it in different ways. Some by watching, some by experimentation, some by theory, some by reading. I used to be a reader, but for some reason, that's changing. It may be middle age, it may be the nature of the things I'm learning, or it may just be that I'm learning new learning techniques.

Once upon a time, I'd learn things by reading manuals. Cover to cover, grasp everything, and if there were exercises, I'd do them in my head. Then I'd get going.

Then I started to learn by playing. I'd mess around with a piece of software, try things, and gradually absorb what it could do and how I could do it. That's how I learned to use Photoshop, in my own, idiosyncratic way. I've tried reading books or watching tutorials, but somehow, it never stuck. The only time I've learned new tricks is when someone looks over my shoulder and says - the right way - oh, did you know you could do this instead, and it's easier / better / faster ? And then I can take that little tip, relate it to what I'm doing, and use it.

Nowadays, though, I only seem to be able to learn software when I have a specific goal and some serious time pressure. If I know what I'm trying to achieve, then I have a structure to work with. I don't get distracted by obscure features or unnecessary tasks, I just focus on learning everything I need to know to get the job done. And, because it's a real project, not a test project, I learn it and remember it.

Right now, I'm learning how to make eBooks. I've spent a day or so looking at how it's done, researching the market and the different devices and formats, and doing the basic research. I've got the tools, and now I need to learn how to use them. I've opened them up and played with them a bit, but I'm none the wiser. The solution is simple. Start on the first book right away. Screw it up, get it rejected, do it again, repeat until satisfactory.

I know the job can be done in a day. Two days is normal. So I'm allowing myself a week for the first one. Then, as I get better, I'll get quicker, and within a few iterations, I'll know all I need to know to hit that one-to-two day target. Then, once I have the process down, I'll start picking up tricks to do more. It works out quite efficiently, and it means I'm getting real results very early on.

I think it's mainly due to the fact that most software is way more feature-rich than I need. I probably only use maybe 10% of the functionality of most of the apps I have. The rest are unnecessary. If I started learning by playing, I'd be lost in irrelevance, and getting frustrated that I wasn't doing the thing I was after. Yes, it might be nice to figure out how I can make a book title that wings its way onto the opening page like a flight of swans, forms beautiful letters while rippling through all the colours of the rainbow, and then bursts into flame, leaving nothing behind but the words scorched onto the electronic paper, but really, that's not as important as figuring out how to put the damn text onto the reader, is it? Task-based learning forces you to focus on what's critical. In the process, I'll notice the option to create animated titles, and I can come back to that when I have time, or if I have a project that would genuinely benefit from it.

It's the same with pretty much all apps. They do way more than I need. So does my phone. So does my bloody dishwasher. (What exactly are those other four programs for? Isn't the WASH program enough?) I can't be bothered to figure everything out, just enough to deal with what I need right now.

This isn't just a technology thing or a complaint about unnecessary features and over-engineered software. This "just in time knowledge" is actually how we learn most things. I'm not going to learn all about plumbing to deal with any potential household crises. I'll find out just what I need to know to fix my leaking shower, and deal with that. (Or, in reality, get someone to come over and fix my shower while I watch, so I'll know for next time. Thanks, Jon!)

Learning by throwing myself in at the deep end seems to work for me. It keeps me focused on results, and seems to improve my retention. I'd be interested to hear how others learn new skills.

It's too simple

This is probably the funniest thing I've seen from The Onion in ages. If you haven't seen it, watch it before reading the rest of this post.



Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

There is, however, a serious point here about user interface design. This is something that's on my mind every day, as we grapple with the complexities of making it easy to create movies. What everybody's after is "add more features, and make it simpler". Which sounds logical and sensible, but it ain't.

A simple user interface sounds like an obvious solution, but as the video demonstrates (by reductio ad absurdum, admittedly) it doesn't work that way. Some things are sufficiently complex that you need a certain complexity of user interface to make them work. By reducing the number of controls in the user interface, you make it appear simple, but at the cost of burying functions too deeply.

It's just maths. Let's say you have 27 functions you want to perform. At one extreme, you could have 27 buttons, each of which performs the desired function. The end result is an aircraft cockpit, which looks scary and intimidating.



At the other, you could have 3 buttons. You could get to each of those 27 functions with just 3 clicks. Which is obviously better, right? Wrong. It's fine once you learn the menu sequence (press 1 to get menu 1, then press 2 to get submenu 1-2, then press 2 again to get function 5). But the only way to get familiar with the device is to go through all three main menus and all nine sub-menus, and remember what's on each and how to get there.

You could do the same with a single button, but you could activate it in three ways. Short press, long press, and double-tap. Now to get function 5 you'd press, hold, press. One button has to be even easier, right? You get where I'm going. Yes, it would be a beautifully clean interface, but completely unusable. You laugh. But isn't that what we so often do with icons on our interfaces? Left-click, right-click, double-click, middle-click, hover over, drag, CTRL-drag, SHIFT-drag, CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-right-click...? (And yes, I'm guilty of that particular UI design sin too.)

The fact is, some tasks are fundamentally complex, and you need an interface with sufficient complexity to do what you need to do. You simplify the interface by simplifying the task, either by removing features or automating them. I mean, it's great that we no longer have manual advance/retard levers or manual chokes on cars. We've automated those functions pretty well perfectly, and so that's two controls we don't need. And let's face it, who really needs a rev counter on an automatic? All well and good. My mum's Nissan is a triumph of simplicity.

But, of course, this may not be what the user wants, or needs. Take this blog, for example. It has basic word-processing functions, but I can't put a table in it. (Yeah, I could probably write one in raw HTML, but I can't do what I can do in Word or OpenOffice.) It won't let me select the icon I want for a bulleted list. It's restricted the functionality in favour of ease of use.

To be fair, 99% of the time, it's perfectly adequate, so I have no real complaints. All I really want to do on my blog is write words, and intersperse them with pictures and videos, and add in the occasional link. I can express myself quite adequately. But when it comes to a task as complex as making a movie, the basic functionality required to create something close to what I want is enormous. The medium is so rich that it requires a lot of user input, and that requires a rich user interface. And that, I suggest, means a relatively complex user interface.

Fundamentally, the user needs to learn the task. On something as simple as an iPod, the task can more or less be broken down to "select some music" and "play it". On a mobile phone, there may be many tasks, but they're all mostly simple, atomic tasks, and the main design challenge is to make it easy for the user to find how to get to them. But making a movie is a huge mess of complex, interrelated tasks, and no matter how simple you make the user interface, unless you understand what those tasks are, and what's involved in them, and how to get the results you want, you'll never understand what you're supposed to do.


It's what they call "necessary complexity". One of the things that killed Google Lively was that it was so simple it didn't work. Even though they did what all the design gurus said was sensible, they ended up with something that was harder to control than WoW and less fun. As it says in that article (do read it, it's good):

So, ideally the interaction interface needs to be of an order of complexity that is coupled to the order of complexity of the number and type of possible tasks. If it rises above that or falls below that, performing tasks becomes harder. Performing tasks with an oversimplified interaction-interface is like trying to make coffee with one hand tied behind your back.

Getting the balance right is hard. Damn hard. With Moviestorm, we find that some people find it trivially easy, while others find it really hard. Some find it so feature-rich it's bewildering, others complain it doesn't do what they want. The middle ground risks satisfying nobody. Powerful, complex tools risk being usable only by the few. But simple isn't always the right answer either. As the Macbook Wheel shows, "simple" can easily end up meaning "hard to use", "unsatisfying", and "inadequate". "Simple" is not the Holy Grail. It's really not.

"Clear and well structured" - now that's a whole different paradigm.