This was the Netflix homepage as it was when I originally did the new concept. I contacted anyone I could at Netflix and showed them the new conceptual redesigned homepage (below). I’m not saying I had any kind of influence, but it’s an awful coincidence that the homepage has since changed to a slightly nicer looking “design”.

I went ahead and took the dive into the unknown and became a member of Netflix despite my reservations about how technologically sound and quality such a poor design could be. Once I was in I was hooked and quickly moved from 1 to 3 movies out at a time, streamed any and all Doctor Who I could get, and became a big fan of the service Netflix offers.

All that said, I still felt like the design was done as more of a working, developer design (nothing against developer, after all I’m one too), rather than a real quality, usable, and astheticly pleasing design. I thought it could be better, so here’s what I put together for a new homepage design.

With this design I’ve incorporated everything in the current site, minus the bland, ugly, dated design. Right away the user knows what this site offers, movies. The color scheme works off of the Netflix red and provides a much richer, touchable look. The new design keeps everything the user needs to have quick access to on the homepage, and removes the clutter and the harshness of the bright red used in the current background.

In closing, we at BeOriginal think Netflix offers a great service that keeps getting better. The current design really doesn’t show the quality, nor get the turnover that they deserve as a great company providing a very current, high quality, and tech related service. A new, updated, “web 2.0-ish” design could drastically improve the new user growth, as well as the current user moral and organic spread.

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We recently finished a complete overhaul of the Washington, D.C. based indiefeed.com. IndieFeed provides a music discovery service to the indie community through a number of daily downloads in various music genres. The idea for the site overhaul was not only to provide a fresh, energetic look to an out of date site, but also to make the music discovery process much easier for the user. One of the many features we added in the redesign was an option to play the song directly from the browser via a small Flash audio player.

Taking it to the iPhone

One of the biggest differences to this site than many others we’ve done is that IndieFeed wanted a version of the site designed specifically for the iPhone. Since the site was built on the ever flexible and extensible WordPress engine we were able to simplify the process of conversion from normal site to iPhone based site. The WordPress community is always contributing new and innovative tools for extending the power of WordPress. We were able to take advantage of one of these innovations using the WPTouch plugin as provided by the amazing and generous developers over at Brave New Code. This not only helped streamline development of the iPhone version of the site, but also speed up the process considerably.

And Finally…

What we ended up with was a site the client IndieFeed can now be proud to display as more of a showpiece than a simple utilitarian, get-the-job-done, kind of site. As with all the projects we take on, we always try to blend form with function. We beleive good design should pave the way to a good user experience.

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