Netflix is Designing with Community Input

Connecting with an individual, or even a company with a personality, is much easier than connecting with a silent company. In a crowded market, starting a conversation is one of the fastest ways to look different from the competition. Older companies are less inclined to acknowledge their imperfections, making it more difficult to connect with their customers.

Plus, having an ongoing conversation with customers makes it easier to change, to innovate. In essence, you’ve left yourself open to possibility. By showing a willingness to discuss both the good and the bad, it’s easier to trust a company. It’s easier to believe the story they tell you about their products or services. I used to work for a company that believed it gained more by not talking to its customers. I believe that this type of policy can be a company’s downfall. Too many other competitors are willing to have conversations, acknowledging their humanity.

Great post, Josh.

Britt…you found the right word…trust. It is about trust, and showing some amount of humility is actually a way to build trust, not erode it. Kind of counter-intuitive that way.

Yeah, I’ve found that websites that change frequently can be great learning experiences. Too bad most of them don’t take snapshots! I’d love to go back and see how Last.fm evolved over the years again. They’re a great example of learn by iteration. Media sharing company Orb.com does a very good job of secretly going and making things better too.

Do you have any other such examples of websites that do fast iteration and polishing, but blog about it at the same time? I’ll be subscribing to Netflix just for the insight.

I assume that it’s easier to design your feature set when all you have to do is integrate some Greasemonkey scripts that people have already been using on your site.

Looking back, I think they’ve done way better at their core business (mail me a DVD) than they have at their web offering, which looks to rely upon adoption/adaption rather than evolution.

One persistent problem is the lack of a good recommendation engine and their method of delivery for such information. I don’t think that pop-ups are the answer, nor do I think that an advanced recommendation engine would necessarily be a good thing for those of us who’ve reached Peak Netflix.

Although I’ll admit the blog initially freaked me out (being the control freak designer that I am) I think you’re right about the open design being the way to go.

That being said, going back to my control-freakishness, I think there are certain types/methods of participatory design that work better than others. For example, Netflix has a blog about what to name a button. This is probably a really great thing to ask the community, because you can really define the use case and get some good feedback about what different words mean to different users. But they probably shouldn’t ask the community where to place the button or what color the button should be, right? We do some partipatory research here that involves users coming in and designing their own pages - it’s usually a jumbled mess, although hearing their thought process as they’re designing the page can be very helpful.

“We do some partipatory research here that involves users coming in and designing their own pages - it’s usually a jumbled mess, although hearing their thought process as they’re designing the page can be very helpful.”

Do say more, won’t you Sarah?

What sort of feedback are you asking for? What do you mean by you have them “design”.

Asking people to design their own stuff doesn’t sound like the activity of a control-freak.

Hmm… you have them design the pages. There’s the next big axaj tool. A GUI that let’s your users play with a prototype of your design and arrange navigation and content areas, name them, and create their own hierarchy and overall experience. Then you either a) deliver customized interfaces to each user or b) take a weighted average (Wisdom of crowds) approach to layout… Someone get crackin!

A user might come into the lab and we might give them a task such as putting together a page that would let them organize all their “stuff” - we would give them a piece of paper, pens, some pre-designed modules to start with, and they can arrange these pre-designed modules (or ones that they come up with on their own) so that we, as designers, can get a sense of what information is most important to that user. They talk aloud as they put the page together, and that information is usually more useful data than the actual design. Like I said, what they actually come up with is usually a mess, because users are not designers (although most designers are users). I mean, you’ve seen MySpace right?

Sarah…. oh such snobbery!

Myspace works BECAUSE it lets you do whatever you want to the page. I think it’s great that you value the conversation with your users, but I also think that you’re maybe underestimating the intelligence inherit in your users. Certainly your craft gives you the ability to satisfy user needs, like “I need this to be more noticeable” but it will never give you the answer to experience design without having the conversation first.

Why is it that we all buy into the internet being able to economically serve the long tail, but we don’t want to approach the idea that it could also serve the long tail of user experience? Some are, like netvibes, but perhaps it is our ego that we don’t want to let go of that stops us from seeing this new advantage.

I’m not a snob! I use the data! I agree that part of MySpace’s success comes from its customization capabilities, but I blame its poor system design for it’s ugliness - that is, they designed it so that it’s hard to make it look pretty and really really easy to make it look ugly. But sites like http://www.scrapblog.com/ give users amazing control and make it really easy to create beautiful design. I think that is the key to great social web design - the kind that actually enables its users to create great design.

I like a challenge. Scrapblog is pleasing to the eye, but to me, all of the user profiles still look very similar to the original design. Myspace is ugly — but it forces users to try harder to make it look pretty, and many end up with something that looks completely different than the homepage..

I’m not sure why everyone equates a company asking for input, and listening to their customers with some sort of customer-driven design. Listening is one thing, but you have to imagine that Netflix (nor any company) is still going to do what it considers best practices and not simply do the bidding of the masses. The Netflix blog seems to be soliciting input but I don’t see that they are “just doing what the community is asking” and thus risking a cobbled-together set of features with no higher thinking. Step 1 - Netflix is listening. Step 2 - Let’s see what they do with the information (and neither praise them, nor punish them, for Step 1).

Good point, tim, it would be a mistake to think that Netflix is simply doing the bidding of its users…but who is saying they do? Do you feel that I or some other commenter is doing that?

Thank You for another very interesting article. It’s really good written and I fully agree with You on main issue, btw. I must say that I really enjoyed reading all of Your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… it makes you think more. So please try to keep up the great work all the time. Greetings