Netflix: Part Deux

Whew, so much Netflix love it takes two posts to get it all in. This time I want to talk about how Netflix leverages recommender technology to solve a classic business problem: "How do we keep them coming back?" Since Netflix is a subscription-based service, they know that when the user runs out of movies they want to watch, the subscription's in danger. And most users don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of films that can keep them renting for years. The solution, then, is to make excellent suggestions to the user so their queue never runs dry.

Netflix does this in two main ways -- with automated recommendations and with social connections to other users. The automated recommendations kick in as soon as a user loads the main page, where most of the real estate is given over to several categories with four featured movies each. The categories, which are based on films the user has rented or rated, could be genres like "Crime Thrillers" or "Spoofs and Satire," they could be regional ("Films from Hong Kong"), or they could involve specific actors or directors. Important points here are that the categories shuffle with repeated visits to the site, and that the system always explains to the user which specific films generated those suggestions. The rotation ensures that the user will continue to pay attention to the recommendations as time passes, and the explanations help the user to trust the system's picks (this is always a very big concern in recommender systems).

The social element is also a big part of Netflix's recommendation strategy, except here the goal is to have your friends (rather than the system) suggest movies for you. The community dashboard page presents a summary of friends' recent queueing and rating activity, along with user-generated thematic toplists, reviews, and "friend quizzes," which are one of my favorite parts of the site. Here, the user is challenged to guess which one of four films a friend either loved or hated - for me, this is always interesting and has lead to some cool "seriously?" moments. There's also a cool web 2.0 sliding-window interface to view friends' queues and ratings, which is a very smooth way to handle paging through large lists of movies.

Overall, the Netflix strategy is to throw movies at the user in as many different ways as possible. Is it working? Well, since the last post, my queue is up from 70 to 86. And more importantly, my queueing rate is vastly higher than my watching rate, so it looks like I'm on the hook for some time to come... good design, eh?

Back At It, Netflix-Style

Now that I've got my degree nailed down, I'm finding myself with a lot of free time (in between reading job boards and writing cover letters, of course). So, I think maybe now is the time to return to this sadly-abandoned class blog and make it not a class blog anymore. And what better topic with which to kick it off than Netflix? Obviously.

Full disclosure to start: Just like dancepunk and seafood, I was a late, late Netflix adopter. In fact, I didn't subscribe until a month or so ago because I really don't watch that many movies, and I didn't think it would be worth the money to get one or two DVD's a month. So as you can imagine, it took me about one day to become a total convert and queue up my first 50 -- and it's definitely changed my entertainment habits, since I'm now watching two or three movies a week instead of zero.

But the reason I'm writing about Netflix here isn't to tell you how excited I am to access every movie Dolph Lundgren ever made. The interaction design of the Netflix website makes it an absolute pleasure to use, and I want to highlight some of the behaviors that, in my opinion, make the user experience so enjoyable.

The first great thing about it is the "back-of-box" feature, where mousing over a movie gets you a pop up preview with synopsis, average ratings, and details like genre, actors and director. The best thing about this feature, though, is that it's universal; anywhere a movie is referenced on the site (by image, text link, or in your queue) you can hover and get this popup. It's a great feature that really helps users explore new movies, and its consistency is very comforting.

The next thing I love is the queue handling. When I started Netflix I figured I'd have maybe five or six movies in my queue at once... man, talk about underestimation. Turns out that since you can queue any movie that you might like to see someday, the numbers add up fast (I weigh in on the low side; right now I have 70 and my three netflix-friends have 126, 291 and 563 [!]). As a result, the queue handling interface needs to be intuitive and scalable, which is accomplished by providing multiple ways to move movies around the queue.

First, you can do a very 2.0 drag-and-drop (it'll even scroll for you if needed), which helps the page feel more responsive and engaging. There's also an option to edit the ordinal position of any queue item, which seems awkward but could be a useful shortcut for moving films to second on the list or something. Finally, there's a "Move to Top" shortcut for each movie, which is great because it lets you quickly promote whatever you want to watch next while scanning your queue. My only quarrel is that there's no way to quickly remove a single item -- instead, each movie has a checkbox for "Remove" and then an "Update" button at the bottom of the queue to commit all your removals. Since everything else in the queue interface is pleasantly real-time, I think removal should be as well.

Finally, I like the way Netflix handles ratings. Anywhere you see at a movie description, you can quickly rate it 1 to 5 stars (or change your previous rating), whether you've rented it or not. The more movies a user rates, the better their recommendations will be, and the ubiquity and reversability of the process make populating the recommender profile something that happens naturally alongside the user's normal browsing goals.

Although these behavioral elements make Netflix fun to use, I also love the way it handles recommendations and social connections, so stay tuned for another post soon on those elements of the site...