“Finally Netflix has come to India!”, friends gushed as they told me about Bigflix, a Netflix like service for India. On checking their website, it seemed even better than Netflix, what with the free drop and pickup; and a bigflix store located across the street. The site seemed to be having some hiccups though. Clicking categories like 100-must see movies led to a ‘No results found’ page. I dismissed that as teething problems, and soon enough, those problems did disappear. Only to be replaced by major usability issues
First, the website itself. Looks like the last person on the minds of the designer was the actual end-user. The single most important action on the site (apart from actual selection of movies) is the ’send pickup request’ button. This should have been a piece of cake, but no. It is embedded in a fancy Javascript layer, which takes forever to load. And to make it worse, it is available on a single place on a single page! Talk about easy accessibility!
The pages have a major performance issue, atleast 10 seconds are required to move a movie one level up. Talk about moving it five to six levels around.
The categorization is bad, browsing alphabetically will show movie titles in all possible languages. The navigation is rigid, you either browse using predefined categories or alphabetically.
Now coming to the logistics part – there is absolutely no communication between the BigFlix stores, and the call-center. They behave like two seperate entities. The call center guys will not pick up movies that the customer picked up from the physical store!
The service does not suit well for professionals working late. The Bigflix guy will come to your place at a time convenient to HIM, and if you are not home, will take that movie off your list!
At the time of writing this, my account is showing 2 movies lying with me, one of them has infact never been delivered to me at all!
All in all, these guys have a strong movie collection, money and infrastructure. But they need to evolve to an acceptable level of service and integration, before they can compare to a ‘customer friendly’ trendsetter like netflix. My money is stuck for the next 6 months, but a word of caution before you jump on to the bandwagon!
September 13, 2008 at 7:45 am
Completely agree!
They’re trying to make money off of the Pick up request SMS that you’d rather send than try to find the Pick up request button on the site.
And what do you think about the little box that shows you the top 5 in your queue and keeps following you as you scroll down the page!!! Drove me nuts!!!
It does not remember that you asked it to show 50 listings on a page rather than 25… it resets to the default every time you search!
But….. after 4 months of using their services.. no complaints! They’re good at delivering and picking up…. worth the few aaaaarrrrggghhh moments on the website.
Shachii