Some People Really Do Not Like Netflix's New User Interface

After over a decade, Netflix has overhauled its user interface in a big way, and... it isn't being warmly received. There's a lot of grumbling about the change on social media among folks who subscribe to the streamer, with some even claiming they're canceling their memberships over the change. 

At issue is the way Netflix swapped out a generally beloved interface, especially when compared to its competitors, that allowed users to see multiple rows of movies and TV shows at once, and swapped in one in which only three or four viewing options, total, are on screen at any given time. With the dramatic change in the scale of the UI, it takes significantly longer to browse for something to watch. There are some theoretical upsides to the new arrangement, like the fact that larger tiles for each title allow users to learn more about a show or movie without clicking into it, but that doesn't seem to have affected anyone's opinion too much. 

Netflix had been testing this UI with select users for months, and recently implemented the change in its smart TV apps. (If you haven't seen it yet, you probably will soon as the rollout continues.) The new UI has not been publicly popular so far. There have been a number of threads about the redesign on Reddit, with posters and commenters in nearly universal agreement about how much they dislike the change. While most of the discussion has come in the past two weeks, there are also a bunch of older threads about the UI tests going back almost a year. But regardless of when the thread was started, the sentiment is the same.

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"It is not usable. You see more titles on your phone than a freaking 84in TV. It makes NO SENSE. You have to scroll till your life is half over to go through a decent amount of titles," wrote one poster, which summed up most of the frustrations. That said, a Netflix spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that in their tests, users generally liked the new UI more than the old one. 

While the comments on Reddit certainly don't back that idea up, the fact that none of the complaint threads have pulled in more than a few hundred upvotes could mean that they've actually also received a large number of downvotes, which may indicate plenty of silent disagreement with the apparent consensus. 

Whether you like it or not, though, it seems as though the change is here to stay — Netflix also told THR that the new interface is much better suited for live events and AI-powered personal curation. So on Netflix's end, there are technical benefits that would be lost if they simply reverted to the old UI.