Netflix Community

Project Spec

Project objectives

The primary objective is to increase engagement and improve the discoverability of content, and also use the social aspect to strengthen and build awareness of the platform.

Target audience

Existing members with low engagement or at risk of dropping off-platform, or generating new members through social sharing.

Project scope

Creating a community base within Netflix's platform to help increase content sharing and social engagement.

Experience goal

Creating a social experience through shared experiences and increasing activity and engagement on the platform.

Research

Key research findings

Content sharer

• People are willing to share content but need certain privacy
• They would love to get recommendations back from friends as well

Content receiver

• They are more than happy to receive recommendations
• Opportunity to watch shows that friends are watching
• Use it as a way to socialize and talk about shows with friends

Product touch points

End-to-end content sharing touch points

The touch points identify product areas that are necessary to MVP's basic sharing experience. These are critical for a rudimentary social community. This could be later scaled to include more specific features.

Key experience goals

• Sharing and receiving content easily
• Ability to manage and browse individual friend list
• Browsing top shows based on your community of friends
• Search for your friends to view their shared list

Content sharing

Member to friend sharing

Content could be shared in different ways, my approach is first to use the basic functions such as network messages to target members and non-members. Providing a tracking code within the URL, we are then able to capture the user send and provide context for adding members to the friend list.

Member sharing content → Key Features

• Customized sharing layover to include member-to-member sharing
• Tracking attached to 'send', so sharer can be easily added as a friend
• Ability to share with non-members to potentially generate new sign-ups

Member receiving content → Key Features

• Ability to add friend from a friend's share
• Knowing intent, non-members could have a customized sign-up experience

Managing friends list → Browsing and managing the list

The current iteration is to try to embed the friend's list under the 'more' section where your list also resides. In the future, there might be the possibility to surface it more when the feature becomes increasingly robust. The current browse would let members see the list of their opt-in friends, this would also include family profiles within the same account. They would be able to add/remove friends, and stack rank their list according to which friends they would like to see first.

Key Features

• View all shows friends recommend
• Add/remove friends from the list
• Stack ranking the list

Browsing top shows by friends → Content curation based on friends

As the member browse the content on the homepage, they would be able to see content that is curated by their friend's list, shows that more than one member has on their list would show up as 'friends watching', this would be a more customized curation of popular content based on your network of friends.

Key Features

• Browse curated content based on friends list
• They would show up with 'friends watching' badging

Search for your friends → Friend's list are integrated into search

A separate and more immediate entry point to the friends list through search, members would show up if they are a match to the search field input, it is not intrusive as it should not show up if the intended search does not match any friends but a show title instead.

Key Features

• Contextual search based on friend's names
• Would not show up if the intended search is not a name

Share notification → Surfacing content share by friends

A place for the content shared by friends would show up in the global notifications, also adding a counter for the number of content shares from users

Key Features

• Scaling the notifications to include friend's share
• Badging to include a number of new notifications

Sharing privacy → Opt in/out experience

Understanding that not all members are willing to share content, there will be an ability to opt-in or out to the sharing of the list with friends, in the future, there might be possible to create a custom list where only part of the content could be put into the sharing bucket and others will still remain private.

Key Features

• Opt-in/out toggle
• Ability to create custom list (future)

Future open initiatives

• Increasing entry points for discovery and adding friends
• Surfacing the features of the sharing feature so it is not that buried
• Creation of custom sharing list

Future steps

Currently, the MVP would test the viability of the feature without having too many features to manage, and the product could eventually scale based on user needs and input.