Netflix overhauls its home screen so users don’t have to do ‘eye gymnastics’

After Netflix’s Moments feature rolled out in October and gave its members the ability to share clips from its shows and movies for social, its user base of more than 300 million wasted no time earmarking their favorite scenes. The most-saved scene on Moments so far is from the animated League of Legends series Arcane that features a kiss between two characters, and five of the top 10 most-saved scenes are from the breakout Korean drama Squid Game.

Netflix is exploring developing additional features designed to drive discoverability and shareability, it announced Tuesday at its inaugural virtual product event. That includes a considerable overhaul to its home screen that aims to change the way users interact with the platform’s voluminous library of programming.

It’s the streamer’s first major home-screen design change in 12 years and is aimed at reflecting the changing ways that viewers watch TV and the kinds of programming Netflix is investing in, executives said onstage.

“We’re entertaining our members in even more ways, which means the TV experience needs to evolve,” Eunice Kim, chief product officer at Netflix, said during the presentation.

Looking fresh

The changes are set to be instituted globally in the coming weeks for users watching on TV. As part of the redesign, Netflix is embracing a “more flexible canvas,” which in practice will look like a background that can change and highlight limited-time programming like live sporting events and specials. It can also be used to spotlight games, which often add new challenges and characters, Kim said.

“We need better ways to feature these updates on the home page,” she said onstage. “That requires us to do more than just tell you when something is new on Netflix. It needs to pull you into the thrill of watching or playing at exactly the right time.”

Netflix is also changing the placement of key info related to shows and movies so it’s more prominent. To help viewers make decisions about what to watch, it’s adding blurbs describing content, like noting that a show is an Emmy award–winner or if it is one of the top titles on the platform that day. By doing so, Kim said, Netflix is aiming to help its members avoid doing the “eye gymnastics” they often end up doing when scrolling through the existing catalog.

Also aiming to alleviate “eye gymnastics” are motion techniques that are designed to make animation on the home screen look more fluid, as well as efforts to unify artwork across its series and movie tiles and its home screen so its visual design looks more connected.

The platform is also testing a vertical video feed on its mobile app that will show snippets of Netflix content in an effort to drive discoverability. And while the streamer has long used AI across its discovery experience, it’s testing generative AI tools that are designed to surface content in more languages and regions, Elizabeth Stone, Netflix’s chief technology officer, said.

The updates come at a crucial time for Netflix, which is looking to increase its hold on viewers amid fierce competition, both from traditional media companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery and from tech giants like YouTube, which is the No. 1 streaming service on connected TVs, according to Nielsen.

Stone compared her own TV viewing interests to Kim’s interests when explaining the importance of customized recommendations

“We’re both tech nerds living in Silicon Valley and working at the same company, so you might think we’d like the same things,” she said. “But if you recommended the same titles to both of us, you’d miss out on the fact that we’re different people with different tastes, and eventually we’d be frustrated with the options and go somewhere else,” Stone said.