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Learning a Personalized Homepage

techblog.netflix.com

42 pointsantouank6 comments

Great writeup...I generally don't have a problem with the pages Netflix generates for me...the main complaint is that things get stale if you visit every day, but that's more of an issue of the relatively narrow library that Netflix can afford (it was much more inviting back when Starz was in its fold). I would like to see some category of really shaking things up...I mean that sometimes, the page shows things that are too obvious for me...e.g. "You watched a Star Trek episode, well here's a row devoted to every Star Trek series and documentary, even though you know you've sampled the other series during your time as a Netflix customer" (and some seem just lazy....just because I watched one of those Fireplace videos during Christmas, I now have a row of things dedicated to moving-art types of videos)...I'd like to see a row of things that are highly-rated but completely outside of the genres that I currently watch...what would you title such a row? "Adventurous Choices"? I'm sure Netflix's algorithm already tries to sprinkle in well-liked items that are well outside of my zone of comfort...it'd be nice to just have a row where I knew everything in it was of this metric.

And while we're on Netflix's legendary use of user analytics...does their A/B testing seriously tell them that the mouseover-to-scroll-the-row-at-a-snails-pace is what users want? It is the most baffling and frankly, user-hostile feature of the site, so much that if I was a new customer, I'd think the site was run by amateurs.

Just a guess, but that scrolling behavior you hate could be an optimization for the case of two or more people trying to choose a show/movie together. This way, whoever's operating the page won't browse in a way that disorients the audience, but instead give them time to discuss options as they mosey by.

Even alone, I find it forces me to reconsider more.

I kinda see it as like a "whoah there sonny, you know I only have 100 movies total, why don't we look through each one of them before you give up there, eh speedy?" which while frustrating ... kinda makes sense. (if I were to verbalize their UX).

On top of all this, what I'd really like at this point is (a) a "hide items I've already seen" toggle, and (b) a "hide mockbusters" toggle.

In particular, the prevalence of shitty copycat mockbuster films and TV series I'd never actually want to watch feels like an awful attempt to inflate the size of listings, as does the lack of any way to just get an alphabetical list of series or movies that fit into certain criteria.

Their machine learning to give you an optimized homepage is cool, but I wish they still gave some degree of optional manual control. For example, I wish I could force "My List" to always appear at the top of the page. I think by now they've figured out that at least half my viewing is things on my list and it seems it's usually at the top, but this can still be frustrating the times it's not.

Also, I wish I could tell Netflix "I want to watch a movie" or "I want to watch a TV show" and have it only show one or the other. I usually know which I'm in the mood for/have time for; it's a pain to scroll through row after row of movies when I only want to watch something for half an hour.

http://instantwatcher.com/ helps with some of the filtering that people in this thread want (categories, tv vs movies, etc)

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