Why Netflix Had to Redesign Its Homepage

As Netflix’s star has burned brighter and brighter over the last 12 years — apart from a few blinks here and there — its industry-leading homepage has stayed pretty much the same. Its competitors copied it, and Netflix mostly focused on its algorithm and scrolling over major UX overhauls, at least when it came to main TV apps. That all changes starting next week. The dominant streaming service is getting a homepage makeover for the first time since Obama was president. “Our redesigned TV homepage is simpler, more intuitive, and better represents the breadth of entertainment on Netflix today,” said Eunice Kim, the company’s chief product officer.

In the coming weeks, expect to see automatic updates to both your Netflix TV and mobile apps that introduce new searching and navigation tools, as well as a redesigned user interface. Also announced are improvements to Netflix’s recommendations engine and a generative-AI-powered beta program. Honestly, the majority of the changes feel long overdue — or at least in line with design trends we’ve seen other streamers deploy as they’ve tried to chase Netflix’s subscriber-vacuuming success. Netflix is a much larger and very different company than it was 12 years ago, a platform that now must support video gaming, live programming, sports, and advertising in addition to films and TV. “Our current TV experience was built for streaming shows and movies,” said Kim. “This one is designed to give us a more flexible canvas now and in the future.”

We’ve seen a demo of all the changes coming, so let’s take each of them one at a time:

➼ A splashier, more fluid homepage. This will feel most immediately obvious: Netflix’s top recommendation, the homepage’s hero module, is now more prominent, with its corners rounded off in a tile instead of inset into the background. Now it floats, and the Netflix team says it can be switched up more dynamically, which makes sense for a company diving deeper into live events and sports; when HBO Max became Max, Warner Bros. Discovery representatives also pointed at flexibility — in that case, being able to quickly swap out content — as a key factor in their platform updates. Given that Netflix serves far more subscribers than HBO Max did a couple years ago, the changes were likely even more imperative.

That floaty, rounded-off design sensibility carries over to the rest of the rows on the Netflix homepage. If you click through tiles, you’ll notice new animation has been added throughout, with vertical posters popping out to reveal horizontal tiles (similar to Prime Video’s most recent layout adjustments). Colors from the selected content tiles will also reflect into the background of the homepage, an attempt to further unify the experience.

➼ Context on the content. A lot more info shows up on every title’s little tile now, with callouts like “Emmy Award Winner,” “#1 in TV Shows,” episode details, and season length. Some of it was already there, but it seems like a clear effort to give users a reason to stop and chew on a given option, instead of falling into the infinite scroll. It also feels like Netflix taking a page out of the playbooks of Peacock or even Plex or other niche streamers, which often include years, runtime, and even Rotten Tomatoes scores in the listing before a user clicks through.

➼ Shortcuts up high. Navigation buttons for movies, shows, games, and “my Netflix” have slid from the left-hand panel to a row at the top of your screen. Max actually made a similar change in its major overhaul in 2023, downplaying its side panel, but nowadays, on its TV app, the side panel has returned.

➼ Allegedly better recommendations. This has always been one of our bigger recurring gripes with the service, but the new homepage promises to be more “responsive” with what it recommends to users. Netflix’s chief technology officer, Elizabeth Stone, acknowledges that while users’ moods are difficult for their algorithm to game, their new recommendations “will pull in more signals.” Shows that you give a thumbs-up, actors you search for, or trailers you watch on Netflix will all go into the algorithmic soup — and possibly quickly wind up as new rows of content that align with your browsing interests. “Everything will happen seamlessly in the background,” Stone promises. “It will just be magically easier to find something to watch.”

We’ll see. The level of speed and sophistication Stone is talking about would represent a rapid acceleration from how the algorithm has functioned in the past, and is “something we’ve been pursuing really for a couple of years now,” the company’s co-CEO Greg Peters explained to the New York Times. Netflix’s earlier version of its algorithm reportedly took a day to shuffle new recommendations into the mix.

➼ On phones, a vertical video feed. Finally? And yes, you can thank TikTok and Instagram for this. In the coming weeks, Netflix is going to be testing a new browsing experience for clips and trailers that users can scroll through on mobile devices. It’ll be accessible from the mobile homepage and labeled “Top Picks for You.”

➼ Generative-AI searches. If you want to search for stuff on Netflix the same way you’d search for stuff on ChatGPT (or Google, or … Vulture), this may interest you. In the new beta Netflix is testing and rolling out to members this week, making prompts like “I want something funny and upbeat” or “I want something scary but not too scary and also maybe a little funny but not too funny” will apparently “actually yield results,” Stone says. This feature will still be in beta (and opt-in-only for now) on its iOS app.

It’s worth noting that Netflix has been hard at work on this redesign, referred to internally as “Eclipse,” since late 2022, and testing the new homepage since last year. It was only a matter of when and what shape the new look would take. But in aggregate, the changes feel almost safe for streaming’s erstwhile great disruptor. They’re either logical evolutions (a shinier and nimbler homepage, faster recommendation times), lessons learned from their competitors (content-tile details, nav-bar hopscotch), or obvious plays in 2025 (vertical video, a ChatGPT clone).

It may be the streamer’s first big overhaul in over a decade, but it’s not radical for a fully mature streaming company now competing against the likes of Amazon’s Prime Video and Google’s YouTube for streaming dominance and working to sell ads, spotlight games, and air marquee live events that don’t break down. Netflix executives call the new homepage “snappier,” but the specific changes reveal themselves as necessary, at least in their eyes — a bet on the company’s long-term future.