When I joined Netflix, Quality Assurance was a seasoned team, used to running very detailed tests on hundreds of devices to ensure the user experience was adequate on all platforms and all languages. Lucky me when I was allocated a team of four qualified and trained testers!

Don’t ask why, but on Friday evenings I would peruse the Netflix experience geolocated for Brazil. Those were my Furious Fridays: there were tons of quality issues!

I directed the QA team to concentrate on “big font” bugs; glaring issues that took points from the user experience. After a couple of weeks, a Jira report told the story: the majority of high visibility issues were on content title artwork. My colleagues had similar complaints.

Title artwork images are normally the same for the entire world. Our beef was with typography and layout: fonts, line breaks, special characters, weight and focus were all over the place.

In English, the layout of a title would be:

Some Like It HOT

In other languages, the title would look like:

some Like IT hot

The Netflix catalog at the time was mostly comprised of licensed titles. Studios and distributors owned the artwork. Jiras were exported to other systems and routed to partner studios. Requests to fix would take months, or never happen. Fix processes were slow and cumbersome, while QA was churning dozens of bugs a week.

As Netflix moved into AV production, there was greater control over content assets. But design services still delivered artwork with the same issues. After all, how could a designer know which Korean font was best for comedy, but disastrous for horror? Or which Thai word was supposed to be highlighted?

With design guidelines, of course! That are accessible to designer partners in three contintents. Each language developed best practices, provided recommended fonts and listed common pitfalls in a simple do & don’t grid. Guidelines were added to the new partner portal.

Problem solved? Not so fast. The solution assumed designers would look up the right way to do things in 28 languages, organized into 28 files. For them, volume and turnaround times were more important than German capitalization rules.

This story doesn’t have a tidy ending. Design issues persist, but to a lesser degree. The road to perfection is often crooked, and tolls are costly. But the journey is a great ride.