Lovefilm’s Interface Woes

I’ve taken Lovefilm up on their offer to have 3 months of membership for the price of one. I was a subscriber a while ago and then lapsed. Now re-signed up I get access to online streaming via my PS3 (yay!) but would have to get extra to pay for games (boo!).

However my gripe is with the user interface (UI). Its not the worse interface in the world, but finding a film to watch is hard work. The PS3 UI is much harder work that the PC UI but in both the core of the problem is the choice in finding a film to watch: For example Lovefilm lists titles by genre, which sounds fine but inevitably as the ones at the top of the list by default are the best rated, I’ve seen most of them, so I have to scroll down and down which takes time. Any system where you have to repeat the same path to find a film, but with each repeat the path gets longer and longer (as you have to scroll down more and more of the list) is an issue. So listing by rating has limited appeal. Listing by A-to-Z would also not be much help either.  The UI should get easier to navigate and not harder as the user engages with it.

Also depending on who is looking to watch a film with me, impacts what sort of film I’m looking for and again the interface is blunt. The idea of user-created collections is good, but again, hard to navigate around. All in all its is not easy to use and you’re overwhelmed by choice. I guess I’m critical because in general games spend a lot of time on the UI. We know the player is going to be using that over and over, so getting it right matters. A lot. A good game with a poor UI becomes an average game. In Savage Moon I feel we got the UI right. I’d also point to Crysis 2 as having a great UI. Lovefilm does not currently and needs to help the user find films they’d like. I have a few ideas on how to do this and will try to get some time to write them up here…

That said there is also the approach Netflix took to helping people find films they’d like – where they offered a prize to that effect.