

Learning a Personalized Homepage - antouank
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/04/learning-personalized-homepage.html

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danso
Great writeup...I generally don't have a problem with the pages Netflix
generates for me...the main complaint is that things get stale if you visit
every day, but that's more of an issue of the relatively narrow library that
Netflix can afford (it was much more inviting back when Starz was in its
fold). I would like to see some category of really shaking things up...I mean
that sometimes, the page shows things that are too obvious for me...e.g. "You
watched a Star Trek episode, well here's a row devoted to every Star Trek
series and documentary, even though you know you've sampled the other series
during your time as a Netflix customer" (and some seem just lazy....just
because I watched one of those Fireplace videos during Christmas, I now have a
row of things dedicated to moving-art types of videos)...I'd like to see a row
of things that are highly-rated but completely outside of the genres that I
currently watch...what would you title such a row? "Adventurous Choices"? I'm
sure Netflix's algorithm already tries to sprinkle in well-liked items that
are well outside of my zone of comfort...it'd be nice to just have a row where
I _knew_ everything in it was of this metric.

And while we're on Netflix's legendary use of user analytics...does their A/B
testing _seriously_ tell them that the mouseover-to-scroll-the-row-at-a-
snails-pace is what users want? It is the most baffling and frankly, user-
hostile feature of the site, so much that if I was a new customer, I'd think
the site was run by amateurs.

~~~
icushman
Just a guess, but that scrolling behavior you hate could be an optimization
for the case of two or more people trying to choose a show/movie together.
This way, whoever's operating the page won't browse in a way that disorients
the audience, but instead give them time to discuss options as they mosey by.

~~~
proksoup
Even alone, I find it forces me to reconsider more.

I kinda see it as like a "whoah there sonny, you know I only have 100 movies
total, why don't we look through each one of them before you give up there, eh
speedy?" which while frustrating ... kinda makes sense. (if I were to
verbalize their UX).

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KeytarHero
Their machine learning to give you an optimized homepage is cool, but I wish
they still gave some degree of optional manual control. For example, I wish I
could force "My List" to always appear at the top of the page. I think by now
they've figured out that at least half my viewing is things on my list and it
seems it's usually at the top, but this can still be frustrating the times
it's not.

Also, I wish I could tell Netflix "I want to watch a movie" or "I want to
watch a TV show" and have it only show one or the other. I usually know which
I'm in the mood for/have time for; it's a pain to scroll through row after row
of movies when I only want to watch something for half an hour.

------
lgas
[http://instantwatcher.com/](http://instantwatcher.com/) helps with some of
the filtering that people in this thread want (categories, tv vs movies, etc)

