Netflix vs Amazon Prime Video: User Experience (Part 2)

Image Credit: thecollegeinvestor.com

This is the second article in the series where I’ll be comparing the Browse and Discovery experience on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The first article which talks about the Search experience can be found here.

At the turn of the millennium, we didn’t have a big Blockbuster like stores in India. Small video rental mom-and-pop type stores were our key gateway to finding interesting content (mostly pirated) to watch outside of cable TV or theaters. The catalog was limited — restricted both by the network of the store owner and size of the store. The owner used to curate the titles passionately and eagerly showed you any interesting/trending/new movies on your next visit.

That was the era of scarcity. The era of abundance arrived with the advent of the internet. With a decent internet connection, the world was your oyster. You could download a torrent for any video from anywhere in the world and keep it on your hard drive for as long as you want.

Fast forward to today: you can stream unlimited high-resolution content without interruption in most parts of the world. You don’t need hours for the video to download and aren’t also bounded by the schedule of linear TV, where you’ve to eagerly wait a week for the next episode of the season or a whole month to watch a blockbuster movie on a TV channel.

With so much of easily accessible content, each vying for your limited attention, what can Streaming Services do to surface the content that you’d like to watch? How do they make it easier to find “needle in the haystack” in this era of abundance?

This post explores these questions by comparing how Netflix and Amazon Prime Video (both have catalogs running in tens of thousands of titles) help users browse and discover content.

Navigation

Prime Video site has a complicated navigation structure — arising mostly because of Amazon’s business model. It takes some time for the user to get a hang around it.

There are three navigation menus. First one is about Amazon.com, the shopping site. Which is of no use here, but I get that Amazon wants the shopping experience to be front-and-center, even if it creates a distraction on Prime Video. The only way I see Prime Video getting rid of it in the future is if it’s a standalone business and removing it won’t have any negative impact on Amazon’s core business, i.e., e-commerce sales won’t go down after the removal of the menu.

The second menu helps you choose between free titles that come with your Prime membership, titles can be rented or bought, and TV channels that you can subscribe directly from Amazon vs. cable TV. The first menu item “Home” shows content from all the above sources.

The third menu provides for additional ways to filter content under each item in the second menu.

This is confusing for me, sometimes. I don’t have internal data to see what percentage of people actually watch free content vs. buy or rent, or subscribe to channels. But, most of the times, I forget to select “Included with Prime” and start browsing from the “Home” hoping to find something interesting and then get disappointed later when I realize that I’ve to pay to watch something I liked.

Netflix, on the other hand, has only one navigation menu, saving users from the cognitive load of switching between different menus. I also like the fact that Netflix is using menu items to curate and discover timely content (See the “Holidays” tab in the menu bar; It was “Halloween” a few days back).

Another thing worth pointing out is that as you scroll down while browsing content, navigation menu remains fixed on the top on Netflix all-the-time, but that’s not the case on Amazon Prime. You’ve to scroll all way up if you want to toggle between menu options. Why?

Also, on Prime Video, the ability to browse by genres is buried deep in-between titles on the sixth page while you can do that from the navigation menu itself on Netflix.

One navigational element that delights on Netflix and equally frustrates me on Prime Video is the horizontal scroll. Netflix provides visual feedback on how far down I’m in the horizontal scroll, and it automatically starts again once I reach the end. Whereas on Prime Video, there is no way for me to know that, and once I reach the end of the row, I’ve to hover my mouse back on the back arrow on the left side of the screen and keep clicking on it until I arrive at the starting point. This shouldn’t be that hard to fix.

Homepage Layout

The homepage is the gateway to find interesting content to watch on both the services. With catalog running into thousands and only limited screen real estate, both try to make the best use of the constraint by presenting the layout in a two-dimensional format: horizontal and vertical scroll; vertical scroll to find content around different themes and horizontal scroll to browse titles under one theme.

Prime Video uses rotating image carousel on the top of the homepage to promote multiple titles that it wants users to watch, whereas Netflix uses top of the Homepage to promote a single newly launched title and shows a trailer that autoplay as soon as you start Netflix.

Rest of the homepage, on both the services, has landscape format thumbnail images of the titles. And this is where I see Prime Video “cutting corners.” While imagery for all the titles on Netflix is in “truly” landscape format, Prime Video converts portrait format for some of the titles into the landscape — which apart from readability issues are not a very pleasing sight for the eyes.

Prime Video breaks a cardinal rule in the “Live and Upcoming Events” section. What was more important here — to keep the size similar to the other thumbnails or to make sure that there is no empty space? I’d choose the latter any day.

Another inconsistency on Prime Video is in the information overlaid over the title imagery. Apart from the title name, some of the thumbnails have additional information: awards, actors, opening credits, taglines, etc. The font for some of that information is sometimes too small to read itself.

To make it even more difficult, Prime Video shows a lot of content on a single page: I can see six titles in each row and 4 rows on each page on my laptop device. Too many choices and small font — a deadly cocktail to confuse and scare the user away.

In comparison, Netflix shows only the title name for almost every thumbnail, except for stand-up comedy acts in which case the performer’s name is also added. Along with that Netflix presents only 5 titles in each row and 2.5 rows on each page, making it easy on the eyes.

Organization of Content

When you have an abundance of options but limited screen real estate to show only a few hundred, deciding ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’ to show is critical. The end goal is to help user find something (fast) rather the boasting about the big catalog.

Surfacing content that is relevant to a user at that moment in time, presenting it coherently, and providing evidence to support the relevancy is at the heart of excellent browsing experience.

At a high-level, both Netflix and Prime Video similarly organize content — a set of rows where each row has many titles around a specific theme. Going a little deeper, though, visible differences emerge between the two services.

While both the services organize content in rows around similar themes: genre, popular, trending, new releases, etc., Netflix also creates rows based on your history i.e., watching, liking, adding to watchlist. For example, as soon as I finished “Narcos”, Netflix built a new row “Because you watched Narcos” that had titles of same interest, making browsing a more dynamic experience. Along with that, I also see rows from time-to-time around my broader interests: ‘Gangster TV Shows,’ ‘Movies based on Real Life,’ ‘International Criminal Investigation TV Dramas,’ etc. to name a few.

In comparison, rows on Prime Video are static and don’t change with my browse/watch behavior.

One thing that I hate about Prime Video is that, unlike Netflix, there is no ‘Continue Watching’ row. How do I find something that I started watching but left in-between for some reason for a couple of weeks and now want to pick it up again? There is no easy way.

Netflix also does a whole lot of personalization around what rows should appear and in what order, what type of imagery to choose for a particular title, and what titles to recommend in a row and in what order. There is a lot to unpack there thanks to some of the research that Netflix has made public. I’ll be covering some of those areas in the next blog post.

Title-specific Information

The last but critical aspect of browsing is deciding what evidence and in what hierarchy need to be presented about the title to convince the user that it will be a good watch.

Artwork/Imagery is the first evidence both services present to convince the user. Quality and depth of images on Netflix are way-way better than on Prime Video. I’ll talk more about that in the next blog, but at-a-high-level the reason is that Netflix harvests enticing frames from millions of frames within the entire video using internal tools and then uses creative editors to make them even better. Prime Video, on the other hand, uses vanilla artwork provided by studios, without any modification.

Beyond the imagery, the information architecture used by both the services is entirely different. And, without a doubt, Netflix’s is way better and more thoughtful than Prime Video.

On Netflix, hovering mouse over the image of the title expands it in size, and a trailer starts auto-playing playing to take over the job of convincing from imagery. A small textual description about the title overlaid over the trailer appears for few a seconds to further aid in convincing.

Still not convinced? Clicking on down arrow (highlighted above) opens a new design pattern which takes most of my screen real estate. ~70% of the screen space is used to play the trailer and rest has non-disappearing additional information — description, starring, genre, awards, etc. — to further aid in making the decision.

Still undecided or don’t want it? Click on ‘More Like This’ tab to find a similar title or quickly go back to browsing by clicking on the cross on the top right.

A couple of delighters stood out for me:

• Two different textual descriptions: shorter one appears while watching the trailer the first time and longer one clicks on down arrow to go to the expanded view. It ensures that information presented is not redundant and also gives the opportunity to show a different perspective about the title to increase chances of viewing.
• Metadata around “This movie is” feature: This feature comes handy when you’re deciding based on your mood (For example: if I’m in a mood to watch a movie that is both “gritty” and “suspenseful” then The Kingdom is right up my alley). Browse by genre helps to some extent but it’s too broad many a times. I wish to see more of such experiments around title discovery on Netflix in future.

On Prime Video, a small pop-up with additional information — ratings, IMDB ratings, title description, add/remove from watchlist, link to the trailer and full video — opens up as soon as you hover your mouse on the title image.

There are few inconsistencies in the information presented in the pop-up: Not all titles have the trailer, and in some places, the partial descriptive text is shown with the ability to click on “see more” to see the rest.

Lastly, Clicking on any title takes the user to a new page where she can see additional information about the movie: similar movies, description, starring, genre, etc. I don’t like the fact that I’ve to click on browser back button every single time to go back to the browse section after checking detailed information about the movie. Not only is this makes browsing inefficient but increases the cognitive load required to remember the context. I liked the design pattern used by Netflix, way better.

I hope this series is not turning out to be more of a rant on Prime Video. But if it is, hope it’s for a good reason :)

Feel free to add in comments anything else you’d like to add if you’re a user of both the services.

In the next post, I’ll cover how Netflix personalizes the experience with an aim to maximize the viewing probability of a title for each user.