Netflix for Wii - Good Usability, Issues with Utility

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By Kirsten Peters, User Experience Specialist 

I’ve had a Netflix account for years, so when I heard that Netflix was going to have the ability to stream, my fiancé and I wanted to be in on it as soon as possible.  We thought it would be very convenient.  Since we don’t watch movies frequently, a movie might be in our queue for months.  We figured the streaming option would be great, because when we want to watch a particular movie, we’d have access to it right away.

So as soon as it was available, we requested and installed the disc from Netflix.  Installation was simple, and we were up and running.  As we played around with it, we realized we both were asking the same questions, and liking (and disliking) some of the same things.  Here’s what we like:

1. Convenience.  Movies are instantly accessible.  What’s not to like about that?
2. Ease of use.  Screens are self-explanatory, easy to navigate, and very intuitive.
3. Great fast-forwarding.  You easily can stop at the frame in the movie or TV show you want without going past it. (Figure 1)
4. Quick response.  When I select something, the loading time is just as fast as high-speed internet.  It takes less time to load a specific TV episode than it takes me to load a YouTube video on my computer.
5. It’s cool!  How fun to be able to watch TV or movies on your Wii!

Figure 1. Easily search through frames of your movie or TV show.

The biggest negative?  It can be very tedious finding your desired program.  We have a large queue, and the items in the queue are shown in one long, horizontal line that lacks any sort of organization.  Scrolling through one at a time is the only way to find what you’re looking for.  It’s a big de-motivator when trying to search for something.  On other programs in my Wii I have the ability to enter text, which would help with searching, but it’s not an option here.  I know it’s possible, so I don’t know why Netflix didn’t add that functionality.  (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Lack of organization in the queue makes selecting your show frustrating and tedious.

Lesser concerns: The Wii remote has a pointer with an LED sensor.  If you happen to move or bump it while you’re watching your movie or TV show, the onscreen control menu appears over the bottom 1/3 of the screen.  If all you want to do is keep watching your movie, it can be intrusive!  The message stays on the screen for about 5 seconds, which will bother some people more than others. 

Also, pressing the “B” button on the remote by accident will stop the movie and take you out of it altogether.  Say you’re at a suspenseful moment in a show, and your cat jumps and hits the remote...you’ve got a problem.  (I speak from experience.)  The good news is that if you press “Play” again, it will take you right back to where you stopped.  If not, this would be a huge critical issue.  As is, it’s mainly an annoyance.

Finally, all the coding is running off the disc, so if there’s going to be a system update to address any of these minor issues, it’s going to require sending all users a new disc.  Since making system updates will not be easy, we suspect that it will never happen, or it will take several years to collect all the things they want to fix before re-sending another disc.  That may not be important to everyone, but to us it’s a little frustrating.

Overall, I think Netflix for Wii is great.  Convenience, speed, and ease of use are all excellent.  But there are some issues with utility, which is a big part of usability.  For me, the interface is very simple and works well, but there are some utilities that are missing.

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