In my first article, I wrote about what is Decision Fatigue and what the UX / UI designers can do to minimize this. Also, I gave the example of Netflix because it fits so well on the decision fatigue field and after talking to Gabriel Minucci, we realized that we can make a whole case study based on this.
First things first: We all have struggled to chose what we are going to watch on Netflix. We stay on Netflix for minutes just staring at the screen or passing by all the infinity of possibilities of movies and series… And after all, we finishing by watching for the 67º time another Friends episode. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“On an important decision, one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.” — Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader
So, this is a case study that I made to practice and also to share some thoughts and opinions. So, feel free to comment what you think about it. I’ll be super happy to read it ❤
Here is the same image I used on the other post, Netflix and its endless movies options. What do you want to watch next?
So, analyzing this screen we have a lot of possibilities. And we can add some numbers and concepts to our analysis:
Time Spent
There are 24 titles, to make it easier, let’s say half of them are movies with an average duration of 2 hours each and the other 12 options are series with an average time of 40min per episode, with 15 episodes and 2 seasons. So only in this screen, we have 264 hours of content.
Our brain does not calculate all the time that we would spend to see all the movies or series, but it knows that we have a huge amount of time of movies to watch and it can be a light trigger for anxiety because deep down on our minds, we know that we if we choose “wrong” we will waste time that we could spend on a good movie.
Endless Scroll
We have a lot more options if we scroll down or scroll horizontally. And naturally, we forget about some things we saw like 3 seconds ago.
Netflix horizontal scroll is infinite, this can be a problem, once you probably will take a little while to realize that you are seeing the same titles all over again. (Sometimes I scroll the all the carousel two times after realizing that… and I have the “Didn’t I saw this before..? Oh, yeah, I did…” and it is a dumb way to spend time :/ )
Comparison
Ok, you scrolled a lot and liked some of the possibilities but you are still uncertain of what to watch because you can’t compare easily some of your choices. You can’t make a “funnel” with all the possibilities you have on your hands. You have to do it only with your memory, you don’t have an easy and visual way to do it.
If you are trying to compare like, 3 movies after being on a long day of work, it may be a little bit more difficult because you already memorized and took a lot of decisions during your day. So, at the end of the day, your decision-making power is almost on the limit, you will be on a decision fatigue process and probably wouldn’t like to make more decisions on a hard way.
Movie x TV Shows
Here I have a question concerning the Netflix business model. When we see the layout, sometimes movies and series are mixed together. You can search separately clicking on the links on the header, but they are pretty unobtrusive. So, I cannot say if this is intentional…
Actually this is a good technique to give us the sensation of abundance, once you keep scrolling and always see at least one thing that interest you. And mixing movies and tv shows can be a way to add even more abundance to it.
That said, I’m not here just to complain about the interface that makes the decision-making a difficult process. I’m also made a prototype to illustrate the idea of having a better flow for this process. Here I focused on the comparison step.
User Feelings
The first thing I take in the count is the person’s mood. So, if they are feeling like watching a comedy, a drama, action… Just like when Spotify shows you the different music genres. With this in mind, you already do a funnel of decisions right away.
Netflix already has this interaction but is kind of hidden. You can go to the link on the header, like “movies” and then select a genre. But seriously, did you ever clicked on the header links to find this?
On this step, the most important is the feeling, the mood, and we gave the idea of that we care about our users and how they feel at the moment they interact with the product. Also, we have more personal experience. So I bring the genre select to the homepage as cards to keep the visual consistency. It has the horizontal scroll but it has an end, so you won’t keep scrolling two or three times until realizing that you’ve already seen all the categories.
Screen with the genres selection.
Easier Comparison
Now that you have a better idea of what you want to watch, let’s compare your options and give you some pieces of information, and again, not too much information, just the average time, and some tags.
When you click to see a preview, you can have an option to “compare” it with other tv shows.
Preview screen with comparison option
Comparison screen with information about each tv show/movie selected
Final Thoughts
In the end, it’s all about feelings and context (as almost everything on the UX field, duh). But the point that I tried to bring here is to open a little bit more of the users contexts and also understand that the users sometimes know how to use our products but we as designers do not consider the fatigue, the over information, or even their paths before using our products (such as a long day of work and just want to see something on Netflix to relax).
We have to make them feel comfortable and confident while using our product. More than empathy, we have to have compassion and go beyond the “I understand your problem” and think on “I understand you, what can I do to help you?”
With this flow changes we gave the user the control sensation, because he knows where he is clicking and what to expect. They spend more time making decisions than analyzing what are the options. Let’s understand and help our users, so they can feel a little bit more comfortable with their choices. As I said in my other article: We like the sensation of having the power of choice, but we do not like to choose and face the consequences.
Special thanks to Gabriel Minucci, for all the talking and ideas for this article! ❤