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July 15th, 2007
Why is the Netflix Site Good?
by Joshua Porter | 
3 Comments
Netflix.com is one of my favorite sites, both for the valuable service they provide but also because they do really great web application work. From the Netflix Community Blog:
Question: “If we KNOW something is a feature you want, or a feature we want, why isn’t it on the site already — or why is it taking so long to release?”
Answer:
“sometimes it is because a simple feature is more complicated than it at first appeared, and sometimes its because much more important features are on the top of our engineers’ priorities list, but one of the most significant reasons is that we don’t want to make the website more complicated than it needs to be. The site not only has to work for powerusers but also for my mom. Or your mom. We have to consider this kind of “feature creep” all the time and it keeps us from just dumping a ton of odd functions into the website.
Do you think we don’t want to have the screenwriter on movie pages? (For cryin’outloud–some of my best friends are screenwriters. Heck, my brother is a screenwriter. Believe me, I think it would be great to get that info on movie pages.) So once you and we all agree something like that would be great, we start a serious exploration of the pros and cons, with lots of designing, with lots of testing, and make sure that it really is a good feature and not just another cool doohickie. In most cases, these features do make it to the website. But we are exceptionally careful at this. And the website is pretty good precisely because we are careful at this.”
(my emphasis added)
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Bokardo is the blog of Joshua Porter, a web designer/developer, researcher, and writer. I live in Newburyport, MA, USA.
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Comments ( 3 Responses so far )
1. Rahul on July 15th, 2007 (Comment) #
I wish I could use Netflix. It seems like such a brilliant execution in every phase (website, actual logistics, etc). But I live in Europe, so no go.
Netflix prevents me from learning. Bad Netflix.
2. Delilah Hinman on July 15th, 2007 (Comment) #
I agree, Josh. Netflix has a great site design and implementation. I appreciate the fact that they carefully consider both the want and use of new features. Simple is always better. Though I have to say, I am really liking their drag and drop feature in the movie queue. Very nice.
3. Scott on July 16th, 2007 (Comment) #
The ripple effect that adding a new feature or functionality can create is interesting and important to note. Many users don’t understand that seemingly inconsequential changes can have an impact on other areas of a system; seemingly trivial changes (adding the ability to rate 1/2 a star) can actually be very complex to implement.
It’s great to see Netflix reaching out to their customers to explain that it’s not as easy as flipping the “new feature” switch to turn functionality on and off. It’s takes time, planning and man-hours to execute the updates.