It’s a tale as old as streaming itself. A new show comes out, and you’re incredibly hyped to watch it, but you want to space it out one episode at a time in order to make the series last as long as possible. But, when you log into the specific service for the next episode, it takes an annoying amount of scrolling, clicking, and even — heaven forbid — using the search bar to get back to the series you were watching.
Poor user interfaces continue to be one of the banes of a streaming customer’s existence. Much of the time, users are willing to forgive a play button that doesn’t work, or a content row that doesn’t have the show they were last watching, because overall, streaming still puts a mountain of content at your fingertips. It’s not as if the owners of the streaming platform don’t know their users are struggling; indeed, those struggles might be intentional.
Fast Company spoke with several producers and design engineers about the many issues streaming interfaces cause. Zac Snider, a design lead at the digital design firm Ustwo, says that streamers intentionally craft their user interfaces to keep users engaging with multiple shows, instead of making the last show that the user watched easily available.
“Streaming services care about hours of content watched and subscriber growth, not that folks completed a series,” Snider told Fast Company. “What’s more important: that we finished all of ‘Glow’ (at about 22.5 hours of content) or that I watched 8 shows halfway (at about 80 hours of content)?”
Ustwo CEO Carsten Wierwille agrees, saying that streaming services use their own internal formulas to determine which shows are worth promoting more heavily, often at the expense of content more relevant to specific users.
“One could say it is the old grocery store trick of putting frequently purchased items like milk in the back of the store to create more temptation,” Wierwille said.
If streamers are making relevant content harder to find on purpose, they are playing a dangerous game. A survey from February found that 69% of streaming users were thinking about signing up for a streaming service to watch a single show, then canceling after finishing it in 2023. With churn rates across the industry creeping up, it’s hard to make the case that this behavior won’t have an effect on streamers’ bottom lines.
Amazon recently released a new update for its Fire TV devices in the name of content discovery. But these updates include pre-selected content rows, filled with the titles that Amazon decides to put in front of viewers’ eyes. It demonstrates that companies know users want faster content discovery, but also that they would rather continue steering viewers toward specific titles.
The average streaming user spends more than 11 minutes trying to find a new title to watch, and the willingness to cycle demonstrates that customers are losing patience. Services like Netflix and Disney+ might want to think hard about making their user interfaces more friendly, and making it easier for users to keep watching the titles they came to the service for. If they don’t, they risk seeing churn rates climb even higher.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”