getting what you want fast. It is literally that easy & netflix messes it up with being nondeterministic and screaming at me trailers I've never asked for. My autistic self is o.u.t.
Netflix is designed this way because most of the time people don’t know what they want. So it’s a browse, not a search, interface. But it has search so I don’t really understand why it’s a problem to see things you don’t care about for a second before searching.
Other services are browse-mainly, too, but are far less annoying than Netflix. Their UI being so goddamn obnoxious for so long, with apparently no intent to ever change that back to something sane, was part of why I cancelled recently after being a subscriber since the DVD days. (Yes, I used the "stop autoplaying, jesus god who could possibly want that" option they finally added, but it didn't seem to affect all platforms, or else they reset it at some point, I dunno and I wasn't paying Netflix so I could go find out how they screwed it up)
Like, it's terrible specifically for browsing, so its being oriented around browsing isn't really a defense of how shit it is. Sitting there chatting with someone about what to watch and you have to keep moving from thing to thing constantly or it screams over your conversation and/or shows you spoilery, distracting shit. WTF. A few others autoplay or play clips/trailers but without sound, which still sucks but is at least better. I shouldn't have to slam the mute button every time I return to the menu just to keep Netflix from doing stupid crap it shouldn't do in the first place.
Better filters instead of permanently inventing new "categories".
Allow me to filter (and sort results) by playtime, IMDB/Letterboxd score, original language, whether I have watched it before, ect.
If I don't already know the name of a movie, I just need Netflix to show queries like "a French movie shorter than 2:20h with at least 3.5 stars on Letterboxd".
FYI you can turn off the auto-playing ability of trailers in your settings on the website. They will then take affect in any Netflix app you use, too. It's stupid you can't set it from the app, but I turned off autoplaying trailers the day it came out and have liked using Netflix a lot more since then.
