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Comment by duncanawoods | Hacker News Reader

Any claims for discovery efficiency is a lie. Shitty UX's "convert better" due in part to the way that they hurt their users.

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.

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> Netflix cannot let you discover... They have to make you believe there is more that you have not found.

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.

[1] http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.ca/

7,750 is a shockingly low number for a service like Netflix, but I guess it reflects the fact that most movies aren't really that good and you'd probably only be interested in watching a maximum of 10k titles over your lifetime, maybe 15,000 hours / 2 years of content

That link is really interesting. I knew that the netflix collection was much smaller than people assume, but I never thought it'd be this small.

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).

The other thing I've noticed having recently trialled Netflix in Australia is that they seem to push TV series harder than movies. I guess if you watch a movie, you're done in a couple of hours. If you get hooked on a TV series, you might be watching episode after episode for a number of seasons.

I think you're confusing search intent with discovery intent.

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.

Can you explain the difference between search intent and discovery intent

I want some shoes, I shall filter the shoes to match my preferences.

I feel like shopping, I wonder what's on sale.

>> And Amazon search isn't terrible because...

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.

Missing design targets because you're optimizing on the wrong metrics is a real problem - but for Amazon to be unintentionally making their search so overly complex to keep users bogged down (as you say) it would require them to be optimizing on number of searches, not sales conversions or revenue.

I think even you can admit that sounds just a little absurd.

They will optimise for probability of a search leading to purchases and likely see 5s searches leading to fewer purchases than 90s searches.

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.

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