We study the QCD phases and their transitions in the 2+1 flavor Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model, with a focus on the interface effects such as the interface tension, the interface entropy, and the critical bubble size in the coexistence region of the first-order phase transitions. Our results show that under the thin-wall approximation, the interface contribution to the total entropy density changes its discontinuity scale in the first-order phase transition. However, the entropy density of the dynamical chiral symmetry (DCS) phase is always greater than that of the dynamical chiral symmetry broken (DCSB) phase in both the heating and hadronization processes. To address this entropy puzzle, the thin-wall approximation is evaluated in the present work. We find that the puzzle can be attributed to an overestimate of the critical bubble size at low temperature in the hadronization process. With an improvement on the thin-wall approximation, the entropy puzzle is well solved with the total entropy density of the hadron-DCSB phase exceeding apparently that of the DCS-quark phase at low temperature.