Bad Design - When 'it just works' Doesn't.

Bit of a rant, bit of an examination of what I consider a bad design. The Netflix Movie Player.

Now I can't speak to it's internal architecture of course, but I can talk about how it interacts with the user and the rest of the system a bit, and that is where it kinda fails.

So let us look at what is offered and how it is supposed to work. In theory you go to the netflix site, pick a movie, install an ActiveX control, and poof, you are up and running. No hassle, you have been walked through every step, you are up and going. If you have problems there are common 'faq' that you can access.

So where does this go horribly wrong?

For starters, it depends on some pretty specific bits of software being installed, Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7. Not uncommon bits of software I will admit but not everyone has or run them. From a design perspective though it means that Netflix has tied their stack specifically into Windows full-chain DRM system which, lets face it, does little to stop pirates but does a lot to piss off the user. So part one is tieing to high-level APIs with known issues.

So lets say you get those apps onto your system (which eats about a gig or so) then you try to install the ActiveX control. Netflix is very helpful about how to install it assuming everything goes correctly... but if anything goes wrong, well, your options are pretty limited. The software has minimal introspection so it can't tell you why it failed, the FAQ really do not cover much, and, here is the important part... no support forum or support email address. You can call someone but that is pretty much your only option. That, I feel, is a big part of the 'bad design' of the entire process, poor options for customer support.

So lets say you get it installed. I managed to have it installed for a short while before it broke so I can still talk about this part. One of the first things it does is find out if you have enough drive space. The problem? It only checks C:. Many windows users are painfully aware of how the C drive tends to fill up rather unchecked. Figuring out what is eating up space in windows can be an exercise in futility (no equivalent of 'du -s') so many users will create 'clean' partitions or even second drives intended for large downloads and media. In my case my C: is about 8 Gig (7 of which is filled with just the OS and things that can not control where they install, such as IE and WMP), but I have 8GB of D: for temp files and 200GB of F: for things I actually install.

Unfortunately, the player doesn't have an option for controlling where it downloads things. In fact, it has no options what so ever. It doesn't even seem to have registry entries to control where things go. To be fair neither does IE, but a lot of people are unhappy with IE's design for just such reasons. So this is the other big design flaw.. lack of even basic user control of options, or more specifically, the design decision that the user should not have to have any options in the first place... 'it just works'.

Annoyingly enough, one reboot later Netflix couldn't detect their own player and attempts to reinstall it keep generating a "A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file: C:\ .... NF_Movie_Player_z11.msi" error, which gets back to the lack of introspection/debugging. When it fails, there is nothing you can do. So I never actually got to the point where I could actually PLAY a movie, and thus can not speak to how well it behaves from there.

In short, I do not think I will ever be using this downloadable service.