Netflix Lessons! — Quotidian — 426

(Transcript of video originally posted on 26 Oct 2022)

He had fought long and hard, against that villain. He had been fighting for the past seven movies! And, only towards the end, he realises, that perhaps he needs to die to kill the villain. It is almost as if a part of the villain resides inside of him… Just when he realises that, and kills all the dinosaurs in the neighbourhood, in one hidden corner of the room there is a large egg and that cracks open and a dinosaur head peeps out. This boy, he has been going around and there has been a voice helping him all along.. A doctor has been helping him all this while.. And in that final moment, that is when he learns that the doctor is a dead man! The doctor who has been helping him is himself dead. This boy has been seeing dead people! He opens the scroll.. He had gone to great pains to procure this scroll. This Dragon Scroll. He unfurls it, only to find out that nothing is written inside it! It is likely that spoilers such as these may spill, over the next twenty minutes.. You’ve been warned!

Netflix! Watching Netflix, … watching on Netflix, … are there any lessons we can learn? Let’s take a tour!

Only when I stepped out of my login, and logged in as my sister, I realised that Netflix doesn’t have one thumbnail image for every series or episode or movie. See HOW MANY images he has created for Stranger Things! They keep experimenting it seems, because that thumbnail is that one moment, that rare fleeting chance, when you are hurriedly scrolling for your next entertainment fix.. “Can I catch your attention!? Probably you like horror, let me make blood drip.. Probably you like that actor, let me put that actor in the forefront.. That actress? This background?” They keep playing, they keep experimenting. That first look.. How beautifully can that be made? How attention-grabbing can it be set up? They spend so much time and effort and money perfecting this, it seems.

This is the product of a company. These are logos of a particular suite of products from that company. Office Suite… (Actually, this is our own company! Zoho!) They went through a logo revamp recently.. Changing the icons that represent those products. That’s all we did. Along with it, we did launch so many other features, but… nobody really talked about those features. They kept saying, “Wow, the logos are amazing”. “Wow, the icons are eye-catching.. This is so modern!” First impression… On their mobile phone, on their computer, that first impression this logo creates seems to impute good value, trust, lot of feel-good warmth in the user’s mind.

Take this product, for example. It is called Carvaan. It is nothing but a thumb-sized drive, the USB drive and a speaker. That’s ALL. But, the color they have chosen, the matte glint, the brushed metal, the sepia-toned body, no sharp edges, that curvature, that is what has added value to this product. That first look, the instant attention it grabs, that makes you think this product is trustworthy.

And, I am not going to elaborate on the countless number of victims to the “Looking great on photo, will make for a great life-partner” trap!

This effect has a name! It is called the Aesthetic-Usability Effect. Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable!

What else does Netflix teach us?! I didn’t like it one bit, but I still watched it till the end.. The Great Wall. About a story spun around the Great Wall of China. The moment I started watching it, I got the hang of the plot. If they had shot the Avatar movie in China, this would have been the result. If they had set the Edge of Tomorrow movie in China, this is what it would have looked like. I was able to predict what was going to happen.

I watched this movie too! You may have watched it too! From Christopher Nolan. I could hardly make head or tail of it. Where is he starting? What is the ending? Even the name itself is palindromic.. if you can get the concept behind it. Too complicated.

But, recently I watched The Batman movie. Wow! Those riddles that The Riddler keeps throwing at The Batman.., and just when The Batman himself is about to crack it, I am able to actually crack it too. It seems like I am part of the movie. The movie takes me along! That beautiful sweet spot? Between that world I am clueless about and that other world that is boringly ordinary and lucidly plain? That sweet spot in between? If you can capture that, you got us! The users? The viewers? Will stick with you!

Take, for example, this common Captcha you must have seen. Haven’t you been irritated? Haven’t you felt aggravated? But, this same challenge, when presented like this? Instead of making it dead-simple like this… This is simple, all I need to do is just click! Magical! Instead of doing this, when they make it a game…

Please click each image containing a toy rabbit! It is not enough if it is a rabbit.. It has to be a rabbit TOY! It can’t be a teddy bear either. It has to be a RABBIT toy! When such a challenge is presented, .. my mind goes, “Wow, I am competing against a computer! I have to prove I am not a robot!” That extra push? Is beautiful.

That is the Doherty Threshold. We have encountered this earlier too. Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400 ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other. The computer is operating at a certain pace. We are operating at another pace. One of them should not wait for the other. Similarly, a product is progressing at some pace. Your mental understanding is progressing at another pace. They have to be kinda alongside. Or else, one is going to ditch the other and move on. That’s what Netflix does, when it comes up with those movie plots.

By the way, this progress bar! That thing that shows you how far you have come, how much more there is to go, … Netflix ran a series of ads using JUST THAT! How something that starts as a heist, a robbery, how that ends up in a REVOLUTION!

When they see us… to When we find the system guity.. The Crown… we realise all families have drama… A turning point every step of the way! You start it simple. But, get a grip on how much drama awaits you! It is just one story away! That was the reverberating message across all those beautiful ads they launched.

The same thing we see with progress bars in onboarding interfaces. If you see this interface, .. you start wondering.. Oh my god, I have to do all this, and I have to slowly go to hundred percent…

But, the same challenge, if you present it like THIS… “You are already twenty-five-percent in, for just having coming in!” The remaining tasks are the same between the two interfaces, but when you start with a “headstart”… that is another beautiful way to catch the user! Too many times, Netflix has successfully cajoled me into watching movies that I had dropped after watching just partially. Because, it has that “Continue Watching” list. He has even stooped so low as to send me email! “Hey, remember that series you didn’t binge watch completely? There are new twists in the plot! Come on, join up!” This, again, has names.

The Goal-Gradient Effect says “The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal”. The Zeigarnik Effect says, “People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks”. You may not remember the stuff you didn’t start at all. It will hang around in your ToDo list.. Your ToWatch list. You may not remember the stuff you watched and enjoyed. Done. Closed. Struck off the ToDo list. But, you WILL remember the ones you left dangling. That psychological theory has been used to good effect by Netflix.

Am guessing you have watched, or at least HEARD OF this. Not sure if you ENJOYED it though. As part of a serial called Black Mirror, .. one particular episode was called Bandersnatch. We have talked about this too, in a different context. This Bandersnatch movie or episode was special for one important reason. It was special because every few minutes it would stop and throw a Yes-No on screen. Or.. A Left… Right.. Or.. Take it or Leave it.. Questions will keep coming at you! The player or the watcher or the viewer or the user has to click using an Apple TV remote or play it on the computer, or a special remote, and guide the characters along! You can’t kick your heels up, eat popcorn, and just dumbly watch! Look at this flowchart! This many endings were possible! Depending on the turns you took, depending on whether you plunged the knife or not, depending on whether you drank the poison or not…But, you know what?! It was a total failure! Nobody wanted to sit.. lean forward.. and play the game… They just wanted to sit back and enjoy. This too is an Effect. In the laws of usability, this is an important one.

Take a look at this interface. Pricing interface from our famous Microsoft. Yes, he is trying to make a good sale.. He is accosting students, home-bound folks, business folks, solo buyers… He is trying to sell. Yes. But, you are frozen, you are paralysed, because of the options given. On top of that, you have an Annual versus Monthly dilemma too! Too much choice! I remember walking away hungry once, when I had a superspread of various icecream options in front of me! Yes!

Compare that, with this interface. Just three schemes. Probably the previous one is better for the user. But, the user doesn’t understand that.

Because of this Effect. Hick’s Law. The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. Don’t, with the noble intent of helping me, spread too many choices in front of me! Netflix learned that lesson after Bandersnatch!

Another thing that I learned… I am going to show you three screens. Can you tell me if it is Netflix or Hotstar or Amazon Primevideo? Choice of TV Shows, Genres, Login to your profile, and this famous interface where you scroll scroll select.. Each of us want to be different from the others, don’t we? Amazon doesn’t want to be like Netflix. Netflix wants to stand apart from Disney Hotstar. But… why are their search interfaces, their scroll interfaces, their profile choosing interfaces, just like the others? That too is because of a psychological effect.

This, for example, is a beautiful, beautifully done website. Except that… it is a horizontal scrolling website. If you press the down-arrow, a popup will come — alerting that you need to move to the right instead. Why am I pressing a down arrow though? Why did they have to show a pop up that it is a rightward scrolling leftward scrolling horizontal website? It is because I am habituated. On the internet, if somebody is consuming something through a browser, it has always been top to bottom and bottom to top. And no other way. Not sideways scrolling. So, this website, even though it is amazing… it is a site about car-ride-sharing.. You see a beautiful car moving along.. In spite of that, this didn’t become famous because usability sucked.

And, why did it suck? Because of Jakob’s Law. What does Jakob Nielsen say? “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.” Even if your hotel’s food is the best in the world, they eat most of the team elsewhere. Even if you are the closest friend, they spend most of their time with somebody else. Understand this.. I am not saying they eat at another hotel. They may be eating at home, they may be eating at their friend’s place. They may be dieting. They may be eating at another hotel. All of that put together will always be more than the time they spend eating at your hotel. I may be having a “Best Friend”. But, when I put all the other interactions together, I will spend more time with the rest of them than with this “Best Friend”. Is it not? And, so, it is better to “be like the others”. When the whole world is doing a vertical scroll, if you try a horizontal scroll, you are in trouble, my friend.

When you create a story, when you cut it up into episodes, it is not random. They spend a lot of time at Netflix, thinking about what should be in the Finale, what should be in the Pilot. Something special… There has to be a hooked ending. Only then they will come rushing for the next season. In the pilot, in the first scene itself, you should show an old chemistry professor as a drug-peddler.. Only then, they will get hooked and allow you a chance to tell your full story. They hook you. In the beginning and in the end. Oh. Not just the beginning and the end..!

Do you remember these scenes? This scene for example is one of my most favourite scenes. That Bella Ciao song.. This is where I heard it first. What jubilation and exuberance! When they set eyes for the first time on the piles of money! Similarly, I got really enraged.. Tokyo… But, do I remember in which season, which episode they happen? I don’t. Do I remember anything else as graphically? I don’t recall! These two are special.

And that is what Uber has internalised too. Uber understands that the experience is not just the time you spend inside the car. From the time you start looking for a driver, from the time you tell Uber that you want to go from A to B, … from that moment, .. right till the moment you rate the driver at the end after everything is over, … there are twelve, as many as fifteen touch points! Can I give you a peak? Can I give you a trough? Whatever it is or not, it shouldn’t be average. It should be memorable. The beginning. The end. And a peak or two in between. That is what every product creator, every experience manager tries to get to their users.

That has names too! Peak-End Rule — People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. The Serial Position Effect — Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

They have researched it quite deeply and extensively. Memory is not the sum of an experience. Memory is not the average of an experience either. A recent peak causes the peak to be a greater factor in your memory than an early peak. Adding a second, equal peak doesn’t affect your memory. A long peak causes the peak to be a greater factor in your memory than a short peak. A quick ramp-up to the peak causes the peak to be a greater factor in your memory than a slow ramp-up to the peak. And so on and on. And finally, an improving trend at the end improves the memory of the experience compared to a worsening trend at the end. For, that is what gives you the opportunity for a sequel. So much thought! From this, we can too, while creating products, while designing experiences, use the same guidelines and rules.

Coming to the Closing Thought, while researching about Netflix, I came across… The Netflix Book Club! Have you heard of it? This lady, Uzo Aduba, analyses and interviews the author for every book that has been made into a movie or a series in Netflix. This is an initiative FROM Netflix itself. This too… is a marketing principle. What principle? Perhaps let us watch it in the next episode! Thank you!