Survey: Netflix Has Best Streaming User Interface, But All Services’ User Experiences Are Sub-Par
To many users, the words sounded too good to be true when Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said the HBO Max platform was “not particularly good.” Zaslav pledged that when WBD launched Max, it would feature an experience that was much more “user friendly.”
Fast forward to today and many Max users would argue that promise went unfulfilled. The Max user interface highly resembles that of HBO Max, and though content discovery is somewhat easier on the new service, it can still require several seconds of scrolling to find the title a user has gone to the service specifically to watch.
A new survey from Variety shows that WBD is not the only company with work to do on its user interface from the customer point of view. Data shows that only 39% of respondents rated streaming interfaces as “very good,” while 40% said they were either “good,” “fair,” or “poor.” If the survey was to be interpreted as good news for streamers, the top two selections on the survey “great” and “very good” would ideally have a combined number of 70% or more according to Dan Reines, an SVP at research and insight firm SmithGeiger, which helped Variety perform this survey.
Netflix was the clear winner in terms of best interface, with 42% of respondents identifying it as their top choice. Among the other eight services included in Variety’s study, only Hulu even cracked the 10% threshold of users singling it out as the best user interface. That service recently launched some updates to its interface to aid in content discovery, but it clearly still has a ways to go.
More than 33% of survey respondents said none of the nine streaming services was the worst user interface, which essentially means that they saw all of the services listed as equally bad. Shawn Johnson, who has designed user interfaces for more than two decades, wrote for Variety that interfaces all look the same, follow the same design structure, feature the same useless rails and previews, offer the same image ratios, and require the same type of endless scrolling through content rows that just blend together after a while. That’s a big reason they all rate so low in the eyes of customers.
There is a chance that streamers know their user interfaces are bad, and are trying to keep them that way on purpose. Streamers know that users come to their platforms for specific content, and if they can hide that content behind other shows the customer was less likely to watch unless it was shoved in their face, so much the better. Total content watched is more important from a streaming provider’s perspective than making it easy for a user to find the title they want, so they are more interested in a consumer watching eight shows halfway through than having that consumer watch one show to completion and then leave.
Customers have more choices than ever these days, and keeping them from churning away from a streaming service is a problem that all platforms face. They may not want to make content discovery easier, but they may have to if they want users to stick with their services after finishing a particular show or movie. Otherwise, the 69% of people who say they’re considering cycling between streaming services this year will almost certainly increase.
Hulu
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