more information = less engagement

less engagement = quarterly OKRs get missed = team budget go down

I've been in software too long

it was an option in my kodi skin. I actually went out of my way to rip it out of the source code.

Ironically the free-but-with-ads Tubi is the least bad when it comes to UI. They have categories with exhaustive lists, and even labels for movies highly rated on RottenTomatoes.

Netflix sucked for a while (don't have it anymore). Apple TV is absolute shit now (subbed for a month to watch a few shows)

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's pretty terrible for the VI/Blind community

Which app is this?

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.

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.