Why are user interfaces so bad on all the streaming services?

Rolling Stone

"It’s been 13 years since Netflix began offering streaming content, with Hulu and others soon to follow, yet the user interfaces consistently seem designed to make finding what you want to see — whether continuing a binge or discovering something new — a Herculean effort," says Alan Sepinwall. "Spend enough time toggling between the services, and you’ll want to quote Hall of Fame baseball manager Casey Stengel trying to make sense of the historically inept 1962 Mets: Can’t anybody here play this game? Not all bad interfaces are created equal, of course. Netflix has been at it the longest, and while there’s a lot that could be better about their site and apps, there are also basic things Netflix engineers understand about user behavior that many of their competitors still can’t grasp. Hulu has been around nearly as long, yet up until the latest update — which is for the moment only available to some of their subscribers — it seemed like each new tweak was done by someone actively trying to sabotage what, based on content alone, should easily be the best streaming-TV option out there. Amazon has both the best bonus feature of any streamer — X-Ray, where pausing a scene gives you the name of every actor and character in that scene, the name of any songs playing, and other details — and one of the hardest interfaces to navigate, befitting a service that’s an afterthought in a much larger business empire. As for the newcomers, you’d think they would have learned what works and what doesn’t after a decade-plus of streaming TV, yet that isn’t quite the case. The interfaces for the services that have debuted over the last eight months range from 'mostly functional' (Disney+) to 'why is any of this where it is?' (Peacock)." Sepinwall offers four recommendations for improving streaming interfaces, including "always make it easy to resume a binge" and "make searches easy."