One big false generalization.
I mean Netflix's interface sucks for discovery, and the suggested improvement in the article is to force me to look at one suggested movie at a time? Seriously!?
I mean Netflix's interface sucks for discovery, and the suggested improvement in the article is to force me to look at one suggested movie at a time? Seriously!?
Netflix cannot let you discover there is nothing you want to watch in their entire catalogue because you will unsubscribe. They have to make you believe there is more that you have not found.
Similar to Amazon, they cannot make search so efficient that you have the time and energy to search other sites or price compare. The strategy is to make sure they are the first place you visit and then exhaust you to the point you settle with what they have to offer.
That's an insightful observation and explains perfectly why Netflix does not provide a simple straight list of all titles that you can scroll through. I'll bet that the Netflix engineers have wanted to add such an obvious feature, but someone in marketing yelled, "Don't!"
If you ask the average non-techie user how many titles their Neflix subscription has, they'll be astonished to hear that it's only ~7750 in the US and even less in other countries (eg., ~4478 in Canada)[1]. Even though this information is easy to discover, it seems that most people don't bother to know.
I know people with personal media servers that could easily compete with this collection (not that I'm endorsing that, just throwing it in for scale).
Of course Netflix isn't going to stop showing you movie options when you're trying to discover something new. If the user doesn't intentionally know what they want to watch, they need to continually see content to discover it.
And Amazon search isn't terrible because of a price-hiding scheme, it's because they have a terrible UI company-wide, from the Kindle to EC2. People typically aren't browsing Amazon to discover new products - they search and move on. Are you suggesting that Amazon search should be an internet price aggregator too?
It seems like you're playing the Halloween music early by saying these companies have terrible UX as a complex ploy to keep you engaged while not giving you what you want. The reality is that they have wide userbases which are fickle to UI changes, and it takes time and research to roll out anything new.
I feel like shopping, I wonder what's on sale.
Amazon may not be intentionally malicious. When you make decisions only on a metric like sale conversions, you will be optimising other factors you are not even aware of. Nothing necessitates that the best UX and happiest customers will be the most profitable.
For example, I recall a story about Amazon trialling infinite scroll. It had positive customer feedback and users viewed more products compared to pagination. However, sale conversions dropped so obviously it was never rolled out. Was it a better browsing experience? Possibly, but that isn't the metric Amazon is optimising for so it just doesn't matter. I expect that there is a threshold where any time saved for a user searching Amazon is not spent buying more products from Amazon but spent on competitor sites.
I think even you can admit that sounds just a little absurd.
You get the same phenomena in retail. You get intentionally confusing layouts in shops, hidden exits, difficult placement of essentials and related items spread at different ends of the store, no clocks etc. to maximise the amount of time a customer spends in their store. It works.