I Love Crushed Red Pepper, But Not All Things Which Contain It

I was using the office bottle of crushed red pepper recently, and I went to twist the top off because I assumed the "filter" thing would be attached to the bottle (as it was on every other bottle of crushed red pepper I've ever seen).

Well, I was wrong. The filter was attached to the lid. So, I had to screw the cap back on and then figure out how to pop the secondary lid open.

Then, as if to prove this was a real usability issue and not just me being ridiculous, my co-worker did the exact same thing. Obviously, this elevated the situation to blog-worthy!

Minorly Annoying iPod USB Cable

So I realize posting about iTunes 8, then not posting for a while, then posting something annoying about the iPod may make me come off as an anti-Apple person... but that's not really the case. I would classify myself as Apple-neutral. That being said, on to commentary:

Every time I plug in my iPod USB cable, I look to see which way it's oriented. The plug has an Apple logo on one side and a USB icon on the other side, and even though I know which way is supposed to face up, I always go to plug it in Apple-side up.

Couldn't they have just omitted the USB logo? Then instead of having to remember which image faces up, I'd only have to remember "the image faces up."

Initial Reaction to iTunes 8

So, I just installed the new version of iTunes, and my first reaction is: Blech.

First off, Apple's created a new Grid view, which they've made the default. This view has visceral impact similar to the Cover Flow (which I'm on record as loving), but without any organizational aids. I mean, this is a computer program -- the idea is to use computer affordances to help me organize and scan a large music library, but this view is basically like laying all my CD cases in a big square face up on my floor. Not helpful at all.

Cover Flow allows the user to visually focus on a selected album while rapidly scrolling through the library; Grid is just like, boom, here's everything. Also, Cover Flow reserves screen real estate for a detailed view of the selected item, while Grid does not. Finally, the scroll in Grid view is annoying: it's a really big scroll with no animation, so it's easy to lose one's place in the giant matrix of album covers.

But wait! There are other sorts for the Grid view. Like the Artist sort, which uses album covers to represent the artists. Couldn't Apple facilitate some kind of link-up with the iTunes store to download artist images? It worked for last.fm, and they even went for user-uploaded content.

Next comes the Genre sort and wow. This is epic. Apparently there are some stock images to represent different genres so the ridiculous grid can strut its stuff. However, the stock images are... comical at best. Let me describe the five genres I have tags for (I tag genre very rigidly so that the tags match up with my main directory structure).

1. Electronic: blue and green text in a "clubby" looking font with what appears to be a Windows XP screen saver firing off behind it.
2. Hip-Hop: wow wow wow wow wow. This one features the word "Hip-Hop" in gold-plated, diamond-encrusted letters over a texture that could well be a truck grill. I won't even write a joke about it.
3. Jazz: Ok, this one actually looks decent, but only because they tried to rip off a Blue Note record cover.
4. Rock: Includes the word "Rock" in a diner font written on a guitar pick tucked into the strings of a guitar. This would probably be appropriate if I listened to more Chuck Berry and less Efterklang.
5. Funk: This, my fifth and final genre tag, apparently isn't impressive enough to have a default image. So iTunes fills in with a Bamboos record cover, presumably since that's the first funk record in my library alphabetically.
   

Then comes a Composers view, which would maybe be useful for pure classical libraries... but for me, I can confidently say I will never use it. For example, when would I want to sort Portishead's "Third" by which subset of the band wrote each song? It seems like a pretty esoteric view for most libraries.

There's other stuff to talk about, like the new "Genius" recommender system that tries to get you to buy more music from the iTunes store, but I'm running out of commentating energy by now. Maybe in a later post. But I will say, as much as the grid view sucks, that iTunes 8 does seem to address one of my pain points with the previous version, which is sluggish scrolling in the List view. Good job guys! Since I will totally ignore the new grid view, I guess this upgrade is a net benefit for me so far.

Short, Angsty Post About Fruit

Dole Cherry Mixed Fruit cups, to be specific. They taste great, but every time I try to open the little plastic container, the juice explodes out onto wherever I'm sitting. Yes, the problem is: too much fruit juice. Since my error rate is 100% (n=5), I'm guessing it would have been enough for one guy in the factory to try to open one, spill it, and be like "Oh, let's put slightly less juice in there so it doesn't explode."

But no one did.

Apartments

As a recent graduate of the apartment searching process, I had occasion to look at a lot of poorly-implemented real estate websites. And, after some contemplation, I'm going to pare it down to two main thoughts for this post.

First, I encountered one website that sorted its results by the apartment's zip code. Now, I didn't think this was particularly useful because there are something like forty zip codes in the greater Chicago area. So even if you know the one zip code you want, I think the arbitrariness of zip codes means you miss out on a lot of semantic information -- especially when considering a place that might be just over the border of a desirable code. Now, if a little map was shown inline with each listing, I'd be okay with this sorting method. But... it wasn't. :)

The second thing that really struck me was the way that realty places can omit important details, like the exact address or availability date, from their listings. I guess this is to make sure the customer goes through the company rather than going straight to the place themselves, which I can understand. From a design standpoint, though, those are two critical pieces of information to an apartment hunter. Leaving them out means that the company is consciously creating a less effective user experience in order to further their business goals, and the same could be said of inefficient sorts, poor filtering options, difficult visualizations or slow response times.

So, my question: Is this ethical? If you were a designer, and your client asked you to design a poor experience for their web app so that the user would be driven to their face-to-face agents, would you do it?

It's Been Too Long Since the Last Starbucks Post

I had occasion to go through a Starbucks drive-through earlier this week, and of course it raised some interesting design points. Starbucks always does, right?

First, the drive-through line itself was interestingly placed. If you were standing in the road, looking at the building, the drive-through window was on the right side. This means that cars don't have a ton of room to line up -- my commuting partner said that she's even seen the cars backed out into the road before. The design solution is pretty simple; just put the window on the other side of the building, so the cars can wrap all the way around the building.

Next came the ordering itself. My traveling companion ordered a breakfast sandwich with just egg and cheese, but the cashier read back the order as a "sausage with no sausage." In interaction design, we always preach that the designer shouldn't let the implementation model take over for the user's mental model, and this is a prime example of that phenomenon. The implementation model is how the Starbucks employee thinks of the sandwich: she refers to the sandwich in its entirety as "a sausage" and then qualifies it as "no sausage," but the user described it by listing the ingredients remaining after the sausage was removed. In this case, it's best to just go with the user's mental model -- but that's not how Starbucks rolls!

This reminds me of some problems I had with a Taco Bell back in my high school days in St. Louis. I'd want to order items sans beans, but I'd always describe them by listing the ingredients I did want... and of course, I'd always get a messed-up order. One day, I looked at the receipt and realized the cashiers didn't enter in the items by what did go on them (my mental model) -- rather, they keyed in what was removed from the default recipe. Once I figured this out, I started ordering "backwards," and I started getting correct tacos (apparently I was quite the junior interaction designer, haha).

Going back to Starbucks, there is one possible defense for their rewording of the order. It could be that they're encouraging patrons to learn the Starbucks-specific jargon that allows membership into its coffee elite. I've always been a bit impressed by the way Starbucks has leveraged design methods to create an "in-crowd" atmosphere among its expert users (even if it does come at the cost of learnability), so perhaps this is a subtle aid for newer customers to help learn the language.

In interaction design, we talk about something called a "pedagogic vector." This sounds complicated, but all it really means is that when designers have some function they want the user to learn, they attach it to a simpler function they know the user will perform. This forces an association between the two functions and helps the user expand their mental model of how the system works. A good computer example of this is keyboard shortcuts in menus: When a user sees "Save" enough times and sees the "Ctrl + S" across from it, he starts making an association, and it once he tries it out and discovers the shortcut, he learns what the underlined letter means.

In Starbucks' case, it's possible that restating the order pairs the "correct" phrasing with the novice user's naive phrasing to create a pedagogic vector that helps the user learn the jargon. Of course, it's also possible that the Starbucks cashiers are just snotty. I guess it depends on what kind of motives you want to ascribe to them. :)

My Dad's Cell Phone (I'm Back!)

Wow, I really haven't posted here in a while. Vast apologies to you, dear imaginary readers! It's been a hectic couple weeks for me: I got a job, scheduled a spur-of-the-moment trip back to St. Louis to visit my folks before the job started, then came back to Chicago and immediately started working and apartment hunting. Most of that has quieted down now -- I'm back in town and settling in at the new gig, although I am still looking for a new place -- so hopefully I'll be back to frequent updates soon. Anyway, on to the content!

While I was at home, I was trying to help my dad turn his Sony Ericsson flip phone (a pretty badly designed phone, which he hates passionately) on vibrate. The first thing I tried, because it's how I'd do it on my Motorola L2, is clicking the volume down button on the left hand side of the phone. Well, that brought up a "phone status" window. Awesome. We eventually found the setting buried in, I kid you not, like a fourth-level menu. Now, there was a button (I think it was pound sign) that had a little musical note above it, and I bet that mght have helped us out... if we could've figured out how to activate it.

This phone was also the subject of a humorous debate a bit back, between myself and an extremely intelligent friend of mine who has a master's degree in computer science. I was looking at his Ericsson, which, like my dad's, has a button labeled "C" on it, and I said I suspected labeling a button "C" was bad interface design. He responded that "C" obviously stood for cancel, and no further explanation was needed. About a month later, my dad complained to me that the phone tried to delete his contacts when he hit the "Call" button...! Just for fun, try to think of some phone-related verbs that start with the letter C. Off the top of my head, I've got: cancel, call, clear, complete, close.

Anyway, the purpose of that anecdote isn't to denigrate comp scis, just to show how a designer has to think differently than most people, and even differently than very smart people. However, if a comp sci and an HCI grad fought a katana deathmatch inside the rusted shell of an abandoned nuclear submarine, my money's on the HCI grad.

Elevators and Description Errors

I was about to take the elevator down to the lobby today, but when the doors opened on my floor, a curious incident gave me pause. A girl walked briskly out of the elevator, looked around, said "Wait a minute...", realized she was on the fifth floor, and walked back into the elevator to accompany me downstairs. This probably isn't too unusual -- I think a lot of people have gotten off elevators on the wrong floor before (I know I have). But, haven't you ever wondered why that happens?

The elevator-wrong-floor mistake falls into a category of slips called "description errors" (at least, that's what they're called in Norman's excellent primer "The Design of Everyday Things"). What's actually happening here is that the elevator user is matching characteristics of their environment to their mental description of how the situation should appear. So, the elevator rider is looking to step into the elevator, ride it for some period of time, then exit when the door opens on the desired floor. In my example, all these things were happening normally to the girl in the elevator, except that the elevator opened on 5 instead of the lobby. Since the environment matched her mental model pretty well, she performed what she thought was the appropriate action: exiting the elevator.

Although it might sound like I'm hanging this unknown girl out to dry, I'm really not. Description errors can happen to anyone, in a variety of circumstances -- have you ever thrown a dirty shirt in the trash instead of the laundry? picked up a toothbrush instead of a razor? or pressed "power" on the wrong remote? In all these situations, the right action is happening, it's just being performed on the wrong object.

An important note here is that description errors, like all mental slips, are more likely to occur under cognitive load. It's important to realize, though, that this doesn't mean solving calculus problems in your head while whistling a tune -- cognitive load can be as simple as thinking about what you'll be doing later in the day.

Finally, to relate this to design, it's tough to make a system follow useful conventions while still making it immune to description errors. I think it's doable, though, by identifying key decision points (like when the elevator opens) and including salient notifications to help the users keep track of what they're doing. For example, a voice could quietly say the number of the current floor when the door opens. Would this stop all description errors? Definitely not, but I'm sure it would help cut down on the number of embarrassing elevator situations.

Peachtree Ultra Quickie

I totally thought this meant "1 out." (Even though I knew Mike Hampton was pitching? Zing!)

Even after seeing the little balls above the word "out" light up as people got out, I paid attention to something else for a minute, looked back at the game in the 2nd inning, and thought it was 2 out...

Concert Banner Usability

So, I went to the Wicker Park Fest both days this weekend, and while it was a really fun time (pretty unbeatable for $5, and Daedelus killed it on Saturday afternoon), it also spawned a debate about how they designed their stage banners.

Each stage had two tall banners, one on each side, with the names of each act and the times they'd be going on throughout the day. The interesting choice, though, was that they violated normal reading convention by placing the final act at the top of the banner and the earliest act at the bottom. A few people I talked to agreed that this was really disconcerting, but then one of my friends made the point that as the crowd gets bigger (later in the day), it's easier to see the tops of the banners.

Although I'm not sure which concern wins out from a usability perspective, I think this is an interesting example about looking at things in context. Since I'm a user experience person, I noticed the inconsistency, but since I'm a 6'1" user experience person, I missed the potential upside of that design choice.

Gameday: One More Thing

I noticed today on mlb.com's Gameday that the center batter view is totally movable. This is really cool, but I keep messing up because the click-drag interface is a little awkward for me.

The problem (and I don't know if this is generalizable to people other than me) is that the drag is moving the camera, not the batter. I suspect that modern operating systems have conditioned me to drag the object that I click, so when I use Gameday I expect to move the batter rather than the camera -- and since these two directions are at total odds, I'm having serious trouble.

What I'm finding interesting is that when I just float the mouse (drag with no click), the camera behavior seems normal to me. This really leads me to believe that the click is setting expectations for me on how the system should work, which are then violated by the implementation model. Moving the camera is the predominant mode in 3d programming (I think), so this probably seemed completely reasonable to whoever created the application. However, most people are not 3d programmers!

Anyway, this is a kind of neat cognitive dissonance thing; even though I know what's happening I still keep messing up. I encourage you to fire up a Gameday page for yourself and see if you encounter the same issue.

[Edit: So far, 3 other people agree that it doesn't feel intuitive. Maybe I'm not crazy after all!]

[Second Edit: To get to an actual Gameday broadcast, you have to click one of the tiny baseball diamonds in the left-hand scoreboard panel on the mlb website. Sorry I didn't make that clear earlier!]

Yes, Yes Indeed

Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine: The Video Game.

1. This is going to be totally awesome.

2. The gesture-based control scheme for Wii games has spawned some really neat metaphors so far. But I think this game could be the Joël Robuchon of gestural input (much like that analogy was the Masaharu Morimoto of analogies).

In Which the Author Fails at the ATM

Yesterday I was using a Bank of America ATM for the first time, and it has a card-swiping thing where the user is supposed to put the card in and then pull it back out. Now, I didn't realize this, so I just put my card in and then got confused when the system wouldn't start.

Here's the rub: the ATM had two cues on how to swipe the card. One was a tiny, bi-directional arrow on the mouth of the card slot, which I actually saw and didn't correctly interpret (I thought it was just an arrow indicating where to put my card). The other was the ATM splash screen, which had a photo of a smiling woman taking up 3/4ths of the screen and then the sentence "Insert and remove your card to begin" taking up the lower part.

The designers probably thought that sentence would be sufficient to explain to the users how to swipe. But the problem here is that my focus wasn't on the screen at first, because I'm used to ignoring the splash screen and starting the process by swiping my card. My visual attention was completely on the card slot, and I didn't even see the helpful instruction.

When I talk to non-designers about various interaction problems, a suggestion that I often hear is that "it should be labeled better." But I think this is a good example of how labeling is often not enough to correctly guide the user.

There Has to Be a Way to Work Sushi Into This Blog Somehow

And there is! I'm headed out to Kamehachi with some friends later this week, and when I was checking out their menu online I was struck by how well-designed it was. Even though this isn't "traditional" (read: computery) interaction design, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite parts of this menu.


First: informative headers! It's not so long since I was a total sushi amateur, and would have loved an explanation of the difference between nigiri and maki (I've seen several people have trouble with this distinction). Also, it tells you how many pieces you'll get by default, which is something else I've seen cause sushi buying confusion (usually in the context of "is that the price for just one roll?").


The menu correctly does not assume the customer knows cuisine-specific jargon. Each item is explained, with a clean visual presentation that makes it easy to scan and process the text.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I like this line. It creates plausible deniability for that one guy who wants his carrot garnish cut into the shape of a cylon, while at the same time saying, "Hey. If you have a special request, shoot. We're accommodating, friendly types." Also, I think phrasing it like this makes the customer more comfortable making a special request, because check it out, so many other people make special requests they had to add a thing about it on the menu!

This is just a straight up brilliant idea. Kamehachi has identified a massive pain point ("I don't think I want to try raw fish...") in beginner sushi adoption and has created a menu item specifically to address it. Someone give these guys an honorary user experience designer certificate, please.

Other restaurants, take notice! Kamehachi enthusiastically wins my sushi budget for the near future, and if the food is as good as the menu this place could make it into heavy rotation.

Ballgame, Part 2

Two posts ago I talked about the interaction design of ESPN's GameCast, so today I want to get back to that topic and look at MLB.com's Gameday.

To me, Gameday seems like a more data-intensive take on the internet baseball experience, primarily because of its inclusion of Pitch F/X data to record the speed and flightpath of each pitch. Here's what the most important center column of the Gameday window looks like during play:

























While GameCast's interface focused on balls in play, you can see that Gameday's focuses on the batter vs. pitcher matchup. My experience has been that GameCast is a more engaging experience by itself, but that Gameday is more informative and even provides great value when run side-by-side with a video feed of the game.

My favorite part about this interface is the selectable granularity of the game description, with a great default: it gives pitch-by-pitch data for the current at-bat but collapses previous at-bats into single results.

Another thing I like is the 3D representation of the batter's box. This makes it way easier to visualize the strike zone and hitter's handedness than the GameCast "here's a square grid" method. One slight complaint I have here is that the batter avatar isn't related to the physical dimensions of the player (Albert is a liiiiiiittle bit bigger than that guy in the image), but even with the generic player cutouts I think this visualization is better than more abstract strike zone views.

Finally, in the top right of the image, where "3 out" is colored red, you can also see how Gameday uses animation to make changing elements of the interface more salient.

I think an optimum solution for watching baseball on the internet would involve a combination of Gameday's animated strike zone and GameCast's animated field view, with some user-customizable statistic displays to top everything off. If Bud Selig's reading this (and I know he is), how bout makin' a few calls, huh?

It's the Little Things

So I just typed in "netflix..com" accidentally and hit enter. And then, of course, it sent me to an error page.

But if this were a well-designed system, it should be smart enough to try "netflix.com" when "netflix..com" didn't work. That's not some kind of science fiction technology that's impossible to program. It's hugely possible to implement that. So why don't software designers accommodate accidental inputs like this? Because of the perception that "errors" are the user's fault.

Typing an extra period is just one example of many mistakes that absolutely anyone can make, from grade school to MIT. Don't let lazy design make you feel guilty for being human!

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

As an expatriate St. Louisan living in Chicago, I usually have to get my Cards games through methods other than television. I am an mlb.tv subscriber, but sometimes it's not feasible for me to watch a video stream of the game, so I turn to one of the surprisingly detailed web game-casting applications. Seeing the play-by-play and stats updated live is great for my baseball side, but my interaction designer side is fascinated by how these applications create an engaging user experience. Let's talk about ESPN's GameCast first (MLB.com's Gameday to follow in a later post).

Right off the bat (pun intended), these applications have one huge obstacle to overcome -- there's a lot of downtime in a baseball game, and watching what is basically a real-time summary of results can get boring fast. GameCast tries to address this in a few ways, including what is one of my favorite design touches in recent history: whenever a ball is hit in play, the "field" graphic displays an animation of the ball flying to its landing point before announcing the result of the play. This helps create some tension similar to watching a real game, because the outcome of the play is unknown at first... if the play-by-play window just popped up "A Pujols doubled to left," that wouldn't be as fun!

Another way GameCast helps fill the pauses is by presenting a lot of contextual statistics. This interests me as a sabermetrically-inclined fan because even when a game's on TV, I'd love to see more information about the players than just average and home runs (OPS+, please!). In the web context, not only do these stats enrich my baseball experience, but they provide something to look at between pitches.

The stats-rich environment can be a bit busy, though, so the system uses animation to make changes to important areas of the screen more salient. Play-by-play results, player changes, and score changes are all accompanied by smooth sliding transitions and fade-ins, which help the user track what is happening on screen.

One area where I think GameCast falls a bit short, though, is in its strikezone display. It shows a grid for the strike zone and plots incoming pitches in different colors for strikes, balls, fouls, or "in play," but there isn't any information about the type of pitch that was thrown. To me, not knowing if a player swung through a 98-mph laser or a 70-mph hook takes away an important element of the battle between hitter and pitcher. Also, a quarrel I have with the simple square grid is that it's hard for me to visualize the handedness of the hitter. Even though a little label is shown in the left hand or right hand corner, I still have to think about it a lot, since it's not clear whether the user is looking from the pitcher's viewpoint or the catcher's.

Overall, I'm impressed with how engaging it can be to follow a game on GameCast. If you're a baseball fan that hasn't tried this (or Gameday) out yet, I'd definitely recommend it, especially if you're stuck in a computer lab, classroom, library, or any other place where watching a live video stream (and screaming "Cubs suck!") might get you disciplined.

Take It Down a Notch

There's this guy at the CVS I frequent who is amazingly efficient at checking out customers. So efficient, in fact, that it's actually somewhat jarring. The moment I start to put my stuff on the counter he immediately asks for my CVS card, but I don't even have my wallet out yet! The actual scanning happens at light-speed, and as soon as that receipt touches flesh it's time to move, because he's already starting the process with the next hapless patron.

As far as time per checkout, this guy could probably win a contest. However, this doesn't lend itself to a very pleasant user experience. I get performance anxiety whenever he checks me out -- what if I can't fish my card out fast enough? can't situate my 12-pack in time? or type in the wrong pin? -- and even when there's a line, I'd rather he just slow down a bit.

Could this ever be the case in interaction design, where efficiency is often preached as a key metric of overall usability? I'm not arguing for designers to intentionally create inefficient experiences, but I do think that sometimes incorporating a brief pause can help the user understand what's happening. Especially in computer applications, where some actions can be processed instantaneously, it can be hard for a user to follow rapid changes on different parts of the screen. This, in turn, can make it tougher to understand causality and create a valid mental model of the system.

Inserting a brief pause gives the designer just enough time to make a changing item blink once, to scroll a list instead of jumping to the end, or to have an item animate into a shopping cart instead of magically teleporting there. These visual effects are one of my favorite applications of web 2.0 technology because they allow designers to change traditional hypertext (a series of instantaneous pages) into a richer, animated experience with vastly more behavioral cues.

Now, if only I could get a "CVS guy 2.0" that would just settle down a bit at the counter...

Netflix: Part Deux

Whew, so much Netflix love it takes two posts to get it all in. This time I want to talk about how Netflix leverages recommender technology to solve a classic business problem: "How do we keep them coming back?" Since Netflix is a subscription-based service, they know that when the user runs out of movies they want to watch, the subscription's in danger. And most users don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of films that can keep them renting for years. The solution, then, is to make excellent suggestions to the user so their queue never runs dry.

Netflix does this in two main ways -- with automated recommendations and with social connections to other users. The automated recommendations kick in as soon as a user loads the main page, where most of the real estate is given over to several categories with four featured movies each. The categories, which are based on films the user has rented or rated, could be genres like "Crime Thrillers" or "Spoofs and Satire," they could be regional ("Films from Hong Kong"), or they could involve specific actors or directors. Important points here are that the categories shuffle with repeated visits to the site, and that the system always explains to the user which specific films generated those suggestions. The rotation ensures that the user will continue to pay attention to the recommendations as time passes, and the explanations help the user to trust the system's picks (this is always a very big concern in recommender systems).

The social element is also a big part of Netflix's recommendation strategy, except here the goal is to have your friends (rather than the system) suggest movies for you. The community dashboard page presents a summary of friends' recent queueing and rating activity, along with user-generated thematic toplists, reviews, and "friend quizzes," which are one of my favorite parts of the site. Here, the user is challenged to guess which one of four films a friend either loved or hated - for me, this is always interesting and has lead to some cool "seriously?" moments. There's also a cool web 2.0 sliding-window interface to view friends' queues and ratings, which is a very smooth way to handle paging through large lists of movies.

Overall, the Netflix strategy is to throw movies at the user in as many different ways as possible. Is it working? Well, since the last post, my queue is up from 70 to 86. And more importantly, my queueing rate is vastly higher than my watching rate, so it looks like I'm on the hook for some time to come... good design, eh?

Back At It, Netflix-Style

Now that I've got my degree nailed down, I'm finding myself with a lot of free time (in between reading job boards and writing cover letters, of course). So, I think maybe now is the time to return to this sadly-abandoned class blog and make it not a class blog anymore. And what better topic with which to kick it off than Netflix? Obviously.

Full disclosure to start: Just like dancepunk and seafood, I was a late, late Netflix adopter. In fact, I didn't subscribe until a month or so ago because I really don't watch that many movies, and I didn't think it would be worth the money to get one or two DVD's a month. So as you can imagine, it took me about one day to become a total convert and queue up my first 50 -- and it's definitely changed my entertainment habits, since I'm now watching two or three movies a week instead of zero.

But the reason I'm writing about Netflix here isn't to tell you how excited I am to access every movie Dolph Lundgren ever made. The interaction design of the Netflix website makes it an absolute pleasure to use, and I want to highlight some of the behaviors that, in my opinion, make the user experience so enjoyable.

The first great thing about it is the "back-of-box" feature, where mousing over a movie gets you a pop up preview with synopsis, average ratings, and details like genre, actors and director. The best thing about this feature, though, is that it's universal; anywhere a movie is referenced on the site (by image, text link, or in your queue) you can hover and get this popup. It's a great feature that really helps users explore new movies, and its consistency is very comforting.

The next thing I love is the queue handling. When I started Netflix I figured I'd have maybe five or six movies in my queue at once... man, talk about underestimation. Turns out that since you can queue any movie that you might like to see someday, the numbers add up fast (I weigh in on the low side; right now I have 70 and my three netflix-friends have 126, 291 and 563 [!]). As a result, the queue handling interface needs to be intuitive and scalable, which is accomplished by providing multiple ways to move movies around the queue.

First, you can do a very 2.0 drag-and-drop (it'll even scroll for you if needed), which helps the page feel more responsive and engaging. There's also an option to edit the ordinal position of any queue item, which seems awkward but could be a useful shortcut for moving films to second on the list or something. Finally, there's a "Move to Top" shortcut for each movie, which is great because it lets you quickly promote whatever you want to watch next while scanning your queue. My only quarrel is that there's no way to quickly remove a single item -- instead, each movie has a checkbox for "Remove" and then an "Update" button at the bottom of the queue to commit all your removals. Since everything else in the queue interface is pleasantly real-time, I think removal should be as well.

Finally, I like the way Netflix handles ratings. Anywhere you see at a movie description, you can quickly rate it 1 to 5 stars (or change your previous rating), whether you've rented it or not. The more movies a user rates, the better their recommendations will be, and the ubiquity and reversability of the process make populating the recommender profile something that happens naturally alongside the user's normal browsing goals.

Although these behavioral elements make Netflix fun to use, I also love the way it handles recommendations and social connections, so stay tuned for another post soon on those elements of the site...