Netflix (DVD) s/w Change Renders Que (somewhat) Unusable

[Beck38]

In the last couple of days, 'Netflix' decided to roll out a massive change to the dvd portion of its website, trying to change the 'look and feel' from the original (going back to the beginning) text based layout to (to me) a dumb down 'icon/windows8' type look.

Missing from this change is listing what TYPE of disc is in ones que, DVD or Bluray. Apparently, they didn't run any browser compatibility tests on the HTML output of their page generators, as their customer service folks seem to be running the latest Firefox browsers and have no problems seeing a 'disc type' column, yet older Firefox versions (necessary with older MS OS's) don't 'see' the column. Interestingly, neither does the latest 'Chrome' browser or any of the (several) MS Internet Explorers versions I was able to try.

Yet another problem created by some programmers who are trying to justify their jobs (and paychecks) by convincing their management that something that has worked perfectly for more than a decade needed to be changed.

It will be interesting to see how long it will take them to fix this latest screw-up, if ever.

[Snee]

If companies of netflix's site let programmers make design decisions, I'm sure you'd have a point there.

Unfortunately, the chances of a company their size not having a design department, or contracting out that kind of work to a design agency are very very small.

Same goes for running tests and usability studies.

I'm sure someone fucked up, assuming it's not a scriptblocker at your end breaking the site, but I'm sure you're not seeing a programmer's mistake.

At least 9 cases out of 10, if it reaches all the way out to the customer, it's the result of bad planning somewhere in the line. The most likely chain of events is that an exec somewhere had a bright idea, a bad or incomplete spec was written, which a team of programmers had to implement in short time, possibly running into problems while the deadline wasn't adjusted to account for that , before it was rushed through testing due to too strict time constraints.

IE, it's the result of bad management.

[Beck38]

IE, it's the result of bad management.

Well, ultimately yes. I gave them another call today as it appears nothing has been done; again, it looks like they are trying to 'change up' their 'look and feel' to one 'standard', making the dvd side of the house looking like the streaming side (i.e., more 'icon based' rather than text based).

I have several machines running several different OS's, all the way back to W2K, not to mention Linux (no macs, no xp, no win8/10) and all have IE and Firefox (but some have latest Chrome) and they all are missing columns of one type or another (Chrome is missing the most, and it's the 'latest version'!).

They mentioned that it may be because of flash, but who in their right mind is using flash to help generate html pages at this point in time? Updated it anyway, and no change. There's a couple other things I'll try and track down, but since it's happening on multiple machines running multiple OS's and multiple web browsers... maybe they're trying to shut down the physical dvd/bluray side of the business.