Redesigned Netflix Launches Video Previews

Netflix has had itself one hell of a week with the announcement for offline playback, dropping a teaser for its upcoming original film Spectral, revealing the return of Luke Cage for a second season, and its plan to launch 20 new unscripted series by next year. Now Netflix has launched video previews in a larger overall redesign directive for the company — the feature will automatically play if you hover over on an image for more than a couple of seconds. However, the new experience won’t be available to all Netflix users at once. At launch, only PlayStation, Xbox One and S, and Roku platforms will have it. Xbox 360 will get it in the following months and then smart TVs, Fire TV and Android TV. Devices like Apple TV and Wii will be upgraded as soon as possible with no set timeline.

Nicole LaPorte of Fast Company talked with Netflix’s vice president of user interface innovation Chris Jaffe and director of product innovation Stephen Garcia on the design direction of the company and how they’ve evolved into the current day platform. You can watch the official video from Netflix above and check out some excerpts below from the interview, read the full article here.

Reflecting on how Hollywood merchandises its shows:

Jaffe: What you saw when you stood back and looked was that it was all about strong imagery with a small amount of contextual text. It was, ‘Here’s The Walking Dead’ and there was a big, strong image of that. Or, ‘Here’s Mad Men,’ and a big image.

Reflecting on 2013’s imagery-focused design layout:

Jaffe: We always thought it could be better… and the better way is video.

On whether or not where will be an option to disable auto-play:

Jaffe: You’re used to turning on TV and things being loud and happening, it’s a different thing on your laptop and mobile. We’re evaluating those (experiences) right now, we’re going through the design exercises on mobile. We’ll probably have different considerations.

On why this works:

Garcia: What this video does is make it so that people actually have to browse less before they find something that they feel confident in watching. When I say ‘confident,’ I mean that you pick something and you watch a little bit or you watch a lot. So did you finish Beasts of No Nation or did you watch a little bit and say, ‘This isn’t for me, I’m out’? And when you pick something and don’t finish it, that’s a failure on our part. So what we really wanted to do was make sure we were helping you find something great.

On why this took so long:

Jaffe: For a long time, the internet technology wasn’t there for us to deliver this really, really quickly. We had prototypes of this stuff, we knew that this was always the experience we all wanted. But we needed to make the investments [and optimize] things like adaptive streaming and our Open Connect global infrastructure for delivering content. That video needs to start very, very quickly or you’re not in the game.

On what they learned through research:

Garcia: People take 90 seconds in order to make a decision about what to watch. So we try to help them find something to watch in less than 90 seconds to make sure they can enjoy their experience.