I'm a heavy Netflix user. In my opinion, Netflix is why you buy a DVD player, not the other way around. I visited Blockbuster recently, to get a big pile of movies in preparation for tuesday's dental surgery, and I noticed Blockbuster has rolled out a new "Movie freedom pass." It allows you to keep two movies as long as you want, and see as many as you want, two at a time, for a flat fee.

My husband read the offer as we stood at the counter checking out, and snorted "same as Netflix except you have to go to the store and you get crappier films." The endlessly maligned Blockbuster clerk did not respond, merely continued to ring me up. Sometime I think the clerks' apathy provide a challenge to my husband's gallic nature, as he seems to save his most insulting comments about american culture for our arrival at the counter.

So: back to Netflix.com. They've redesigned their site. Because I visit Netflix so often, and typically from clicking an email as often as navigating there, I had the good fortune to have old Netflix and new Netflix open in two windows and was able to capture at a page of each for comparison. And here is my rambling observations...

Below is the redesign explanation page. Most sites undergoing a major redesign now respect this best practice. A few years back, complete redesigns & rearchitectures were sprung on users regularly with hardly a word of explanation. Now there is usually a tour or guidepage explaining what sort of mischief the designers have been getting into and how to adjust to the new design. Even when a design is a great improvement, users of the previous design will often have problems as they relearn the interface.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the users will not turn to the explanation page, except perhaps out of curiosity or if they can't locate a favored feature and want to see if it's still there. Tours tend to get the traffic of a good banner ad... abysmal. Still, it's good to offer help to those who seek it.

In my case I'm thwarted by the move of search (#6) from the left (common not only to the old netflix but to many other of my regularly visited sites such as amazon) to the right. I'm sure someone had a deep and passionate argument about how having the search box on the right was more ergonomic and intuitive, but damn if I don't keep looking for it on the left every time.
(There was a poster at this year's ia summit with typical location of things like shopping cart and search-- anyone have a link?)

Below we have the old netflix queue page and the new one. This is a page I spend a lot of time on, moving movies up and down the queue as my mood swings from serious to playful and my needs from blockbuster-stupid to intellectually challenging. I doubt I'm unusual in this pastime. Netflix's few drawbacks is you can't match film to mood easily.

There are two big changes in this page. One is the aqua-ization of the design. Everything is shiny 3-D macraphics. Why? Page was loading too fast? That fountain pen really enriches my renting experience! Those round tabs makes me feel so futuristic, like I'm in minority report!

I will admit that I have a personal aesthetic preference for the flat interface, and I really don't get what a 3-d tab brings to the experience. But then, OSX leaves me vaguely seasick, and when my XP machine arrived, I spent a hunk of time removing the fisher-price interface and returning to the simple "windows classic". This is my caveat... I like flat. Still, I do suspect this design will look dated pretty fast.

Moving beyond the veneer, let's consider use. This page is a highly utilitarian one. Why add visuals that don't help? The fountain pen neither helps in wayfinding nor explains how to use the page, nor sets the tone for the task. It bespeaks a designer's struggle digging through clip-art seeking an image that represents managing a queue of movies-- maybe the solution was no image?

Is an image necessary on this page at all? Setting the tone of the service's brand seems far more appropriate on the home page, perhaps lightly across the browse pages. But once you get to a page the regular committed user accesses again and again, why not make it lightweight and swift, with no unnecessary elements?

One thing the image does do is tie the tabs into the page. Often tabs are tossed on top of an interface like a hat, and have no visual connection with the page they modify. This undermines their power-- the ability to show state and provide both location and alternatives. The new tabs are far better tied to the pages they modify than the old buttonettes.

Are tabs the right metaphor for Netflix? On the web, you see two uses for tabs. the old software metaphor, which is different views of the same thing, and the new/old folder metaphor, top-level groupings of items. Amazon uses tabs in this way, as do most.

Netflix is using tabs to indicate the three different tasks a user might accomplish on their site, an atypical use for tabs. Tabs are probably the wrong widget, then. But a little rebel within whispers "I bet they tested great in usability."

Another big change you'll notice is the removal of the left-hand navigation. I'm going to assume they looked at the number of clicks this received, and decided that it was not serving any purpose beyond noise. On the other-hand, its removal basically renders this page a dead end. You've tweaked your queue, you are satisfied the right films are lined up to arrive... now what? What does the user want to do next?

My answer is usually

1. Find more movies on netflix
2. Go to IMDB and read up on a movie, or find suggestions for another.
3. Leave to do something else.

You can no longer easily do any of these on this page. Why not offer movie recommendations here? Why not do a deal with IMDB? Why not take overture text-link ads to take advantage of an exit point?

I think Amazon is the master of the "no dead-ends" philosophy. Every click provides you with a thousand other tempting offers, until you enter the check out tunnel. Netflix has got your money, the best thing they can do is make sure you view them as an indispensable part of your existence. Part of that means making sure you have a rich queue of movies so you never sit at home with no red envelope, wondering what you are paying for.

I'll be in paris again, a week from tomorrow. Anyone in the area interested in a coffee or a drink, please contact me.

Noel spots some good advice: wash meat.

Cool new group, Yahoo! Groups : y-search-users, which includes the Yahoo! Search product and design teams.. come ask questions, lob ideas, and ponder that core Internet art, search.

The book I'm foisting on my team these days is Paula Scher's Make It Bigger. Make It Bigger is immediately appealing with its odd shape, powerful use of type and wooden cover. Cracking it open, you discover Ms. Scher designed much of the imagery from the 70's-80's that you might recall, from the dubious distinction of Boston's "spaceship" cover, to the endlessly copied "Bring on the Noise, Bring on the funk" poster, to the controversial and eventually canonized Swatch-swiss poster parody. Flipping through the book it is clear the power one designer can have over how the world looks.

But more interesting to me, and the reason I keep making my designers read it, is her approaches to dealing with clients and her concept of "selling down." (poor screen shot here of one of the many wonderful diagrams she users to explain how sign-off processes work--btw, the screenshots amazon chooses to show are just appalling-- here is a book full of gorgeous colorful design and they choose a few text heavy pages? What up?). Having started her career making a design, having the assistant art director suggest changes, the art director suggest to changes, the creative directory suggest changes, the product manager suggest changes, the VP of sales make changes.. she realized she had to make changes to how she presented her designs.

The title itself -- Make It Bigger-- refers to Paula's endless battle to help clients be able to see the design clearly, and accept it without the layers of hierarchy pissing on it (my words, not hers). By end running the hierarchy and then selling down rather than up, she is able to avoid watered-down design arriving for final approval.

All of us have heard those words-- Make It Bigger, Make It Red, Put It On Top. But only a few have learned how to deal with it. In these days of designer disillusionment and rising struggle to make our work count again, Paul's book comes at just the right time. The work quickly dismisses the idea that design is irrelevant while the text and diagrams give young designers the tools they need to navigate political waters.

Yo,

My husband is in Denver, messing with x-ray diffraction people and calling me mopeily from his hotel room at the end of the night which is gratifying. I like being the one he misses as his head hits the pillow.

Me, I'm trying to design. Kerning a line, messing with photoshop filters, scribbling madly on paper... all for my private pleasure. I forgot how fun it is to play. To design for joy, not for profit.

What else? I'm biking to work, still yoga'ing, and mentoring two junior interaction designers which is the best part of my job bar none. I think I should have been a teacher. I also do the rest of the management dance-- resource, plan, project, powerpoint-- not so much design. Unless designing a place where design can happen is design. Which we both know it is. Still, sometimes you just need to sharpen a pencil and make marks.

Lots going on rumble wise in the design world these days. Tog wants a new title, Mok wants the old one to mean something again. I used the opportunity to put my foot in my mouth and insulted Tog on the aifia members list (not purposely, of course, but foolishly and typical christina bull/chinashop fashion).

He answered-- huffily at first, but I apologized and he could smell the teva on my breath and forgave me. We had a lively chat which continues still (I'll let you know if anything interesting comes of it) and as the long suffering aifia board continues wishing they had a president who they could trust to speak without a scriptwriter, I've made a pal. I hope anyhow. Which is a bit confusing... I've written tons of nice stuff about Tog, but I had to be a stupid jerk in public to finally make contact? Gee, life is funny. I guess now I'll have to insult Clemet.. Hey, Mok, your mother smells of elderberry!

Meanwhile discussion heats up over ROI on B&A and Julie ruins the Saute de Boeuf a la Bourguignonne... really too tragic.

OKay, I go bed now.

Well, they are at it again. This is a neat little tool-- let's you flip back a couple products seamlessly. So I play with it, and many questions leap to mind.

Is this the right location? I found it, so maybe... but it is in a location that is about leavin your current task, shopping, and doing a differt sort of task-- going more global-- to checking an order, or checking out... why don't more people do task analysis on the interface? it works wonderfully for understanding what folks are paying attention to when. The location also requires the product images to be so small as to to be utterly unrecognizable.



This flavor of dropdown is surprising. At least they don't make it look like a traditional dropdown. Still, it's odd to see a list of items ended with a little "see also" unit.

The question is my usual one-- when a designer wildly flouts conventions, then what? I can't condemn it out of hand because I haven't seen it in the usability lab. Conventions are fine, but one never knows when breaking the rules will allow one to leap past the competition. Could this be such a leap?

And yet my experience watching hundreds of users interact with websites makes me guess that it won't work very well. On the other hand, Amazon is known to test everything-- though I've heard its A/B testing. They put out a design to a percentage of their users. And they watch clicks. Is it getting clicks?

But what do those clicks tell Amazon? That users like/understand/value the property? Or that the colors drew their eyes however breifly?

Quantititative for what, qualitative for why.. you don't want half the story...

I'll be interested in what this new widget does in the next few weeks. Will it change, grow, or disappear like amazon's earlier stacked tabs?

It doesn't take usability testing to tell me this is bad. Having looked at products, I go to "my account. And look what happens to my history.