April 03, 2004

Design Case

Elegant Hack poses an interesting design problem for students (or anyone, I guess): Redesign the relatively clunky Netflix movie queue.
Queue management is fairly complex, especially in a two-person household like mine. For example, I went out of town. Suddenly philippe needed to get all "his" movies to the top of the queue. However, once I get back, we want to sprinkle a combination of his, mine and ours. We also go through moods-- comedies, classics, french. We also watch old series sometimes, like the avenger, and unlike other movies, it is *not* Kay if the second disk comes before the first. Really, once the queue grows to 200+ proportions, the problems are very different. You don't actually care if a movie is 57 or 62 in the queue-- what matters is "right now" and "someday" for a given film. How could this be handled?
[via Dan Saffer, on the ID Discuss list] Posted by johndan at April 3, 2004 11:40 AM | TrackBack