This design looks so cheap to me, it’s just a bunch of random covers, there is no information about the movies presented in any way, the covers are way too big and take up an inordinate amount of space and there is nothing breaking up sections, design is just so fucking dumb now, fuck mobile
rant over 😅
And make sure everything you mouseover trying to get a blurb or something instead just jumps around like a Jack Russell terrier trying to grab your attention. I fucking hate having to find a place to park my mouse so it isn’t autoplaying some bullshit I have no interest in.
I mean, if they could let you click on the picture and it “flips” over and then there’s some info and a few stills from the movie… This was how Video Rental stores worked for years.
Which app is this?
Our bold, brilliant leaders and innovators once again doing what everyone else is doing, even when it is stupid.
The large cover design isn’t even the worst bit, it’s how hard it is to find concrete genre categories in a lot of these streaming apps. You’d have a bunch of overlapping categories like most popular whatever in whereever and so on, they quite literally hide the option to just go to movies -> genre -> list everything in some apps (Netflix was hard to find at some point).
Now I just pirate whatever old movies come to mind and stuff them in Jellyfin. Right now it’s Minority Report. Up next… Hmm I downloaded man from U.N.C.L.E the other day, might watch that.
It’s pretty terrible for the VI/Blind community
Click on a cover to get more info.
Honestly it feels a bit like browsing a shelf of books or DvD boxes or something. It certainly could have some improvements but I don’t think this is that bad.
I dont mind the Top 10 Carousel, but it would be nice if it has a Title and a Rating under it.
A lot of the “For You” algorithm stuff is fine, but I would prefer to have that in a Table. Title, Synopsis, Rating, length, Director, Cast. so if it sounds interesting, I can click through, but I am not going back and forth constantly.
Also gimmie a bit list I can sort. You can even have things like Movie Posters show when hovering over the name.
They don’t want to show you ratings, because that will make it obvious how shit their catalog is.
but if you mouse over the cover, it starts autoplaying a preview and you can’t stop it
Everything about using the internet and its various “services” has turned to absolute garbage in the last 15 years.
It’s what happens when you let marketing dickheads be in charge of everything.
I didn’t look at all the comments, but this is intentional. One of the streaming platforms (probably Netflix or Amazon) originally made an algorithm that tailors posters to the individual. It’s the usual A/B testing psychological bullshit designed to maximize your likelihood of watching a movie.
My wife watched The Get Down and another series I think it was called “Woke” (two series with predominantly black cast) back to back in the same weekend and the Netflix algorithm started to put the black character of every show as the center piece on every picture. Like we already watched house of card, we know that the black lobbyist guy is barely a support character, don’t try to fool us putting him in the center of the poster
I’m so happy I don’t have Netflix… That sounds extreamly manipulative. Interesting to know they do this but not surprising since it’s Netflix.
One of the reasons I dropped Netflix was because they kept changing the pictures on shit so I’d think there was new content only to see id already watched it when I clicked on it. That got old quick. Don’t have that issue when I just pirate shit.
Exactly. User hostile methods like this are a deal breaker.
Even worse when the streaming site publishes it under multiple covers. So freaking annoying.
Way too often I see a cover I don’t recognize and think it might be something I’d like, but get a couple minutes in before realizing I’ve seen it before.
I imagine it’s marketing trying to see what cover gets the most clicks but at the cost of annoying its customers
Probably designed like that to increase click through
Because you have to click to work out wtf anything is.
For sure. Never said it was a good thing from a ux perspective. But if marketing, mgmt, or whoever is only looking at the company click through kpi, that will drive this shitty design. The other comment I see explains it a little better, but that’s just one potential reason.
Some people also think “word bad” so they go to obscure icons and textless interfaces. Frustrates the shit out of me personally. Especially when said obscure icon has no clear distinction and no pop up text. I hate having to rely on pop up text too. Either do only text or icon with text so everyone can see and know what it is.
The dangers of optimizing for the wrong numbers
Some marketer: “the click rate on this design is so much better than before, we will keep it!” And then not questioning or following up why
Seen it happening myself multiple times already
i try to use browser extensions that add movie ratings, so annoying
Web/UI design in general has sucked for at least 14 years now. Everything is spaced too far apart and text/images are too big. Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words. Pointless animations and gradients slow everything down for no reason.
The thing that drives me the craziest is when a long title or sentence or whatever is just truncated with ellipses, even when there is ENORMOUS blank white space around it that would easily allow the whole thing to be shown with word-wrapping. Youtube shorts is the most egregious example of this, and they recently managed to make it even worse. It used to be that you could open up the comments for a short and that would make the entire long title readable, but they “fixed” that so it stays ellipsized even then.
The app I use at work to clock in and out ellipsizes my own name halfway through my middle name, and it could be easily fixed by just stretching the control that displays the name all the way to each edge. I used to be a mobile app developer and I know exactly why this happens: the UI designer uses a bogus short name like “Bob Smith” on the original design document and the developer who implements it puts in a control just big enough for that. I used to encounter this kind of thing and I would fix it with common sense, and then the UI designer would get mad and insist that my fix be reverted, even though that resulted in something that couldn’t display the information properly.
Icons are used for critical functionality instead of words.
Not just web ui. I’ve noticed this trend with applications as well. It’s much harder to learn new applications now because you have to look up a guide for everything. Hovering over the icons doesn’t even work as often as it should.
Because hovering/tooltips doesn’t work for touchscreens and designers don’t give two shits about anything else.
I just discovered a new function on my car - when I listen to music, a small rectangle appears with audio controls …… apparently it a tile that can be scrolled left and right to see other data. I never would have thought to try that if I didn’t read it somewhere, no visual cues
Mobile first! MoBiLE FiRsT!!!
What that?
AI?
AI FiRst!!
For some apps, like YouTube or Netflix is TV first now. Make sense having big spaced icons, instead of a screen packed with information
It’s ruled by clicks, rather than usefulness or friendliness
This is largely part of being on multilingual web. It costs a lot of engineering time and effort to try and translate a page to multiple languages, but icons infer meaning without this need.
Those movie posters are for people who have already seen the movie or at least of knowledge of the story.
E: I’m guessing.
This is not really about the posters but the web design and a general lament for web design, those are also a problem tbh
What difference are you seeing that I’m not?
A Netflix listing doesn’t need to be same as outside a movie theater. They can be more similar to a tv guide.
I think the main complaint is that your examples show detail about the movie, not just a close up of someone’s face
For example jaws has a giant shark attacking a person. Compare that to a close up of Bane’s face. You might not even realize it’s a batman movie of you aren’t familiar with it already.
Star wars poster shows space ships and laser sword.
Many movie posters are just the main characters now with head shots vs trying to tell a story.
I don’t full agree with the op, just my interpretation of what I think they are complaining about
What we really need is an app that uses the Ghanaian movie posters.
I thought it was about the website design as opposed to the posters. Like why dont you get a small infobox for every movie with name, runtime, age-rating, plotsummary… Instead its just the posters
But words make people read and reading is one of videos competitors.
Yes you are correct it’s mainly about the web site design, but the posters deserve their own post
Bingo, movie posters have absolutely gone down hill. They all look the same now.
I can see it now that you mention it. Thanks for the insight!
