It's a TV night at home, Jenn and I are looking for a new show on Netflix, until… we decide to move to another app to find something to watch… but the Netflix app looks and feels fine, everything works as expected, the content is vast. What's missing?
Let me set the context quickly; When we search for a show, we follow a path like this:
You can see how the Look for a trailer step is not as straightforward as the others. A user story comes out from that experience:
As a Netflix user who wants to make the most of their leisure time, I want to quickly preview a show's trailer so I can make a confident decision without interrupting the browsing flow or committing to a full episode.
This is a very clear case of optimizing “time to value”, where the cost of decision fatigue compounds with every unclear action.
In my journey I discovered three moments that could serve as leverage points to improve the What to Watch experience and could meaningfully increase engagement and viewership:
I'll develop the ideas in that order.
In the Netflix UI on TV, trailers for shows are harder to find than trailers for movies. There’s an asymmetry of effort that goes against Jakob's Law: "People transfer expectations from one experience to another", and from that law we can extrapolate that similar goals should require similar levels of effort.
For movies, you just select the movie and have the option to Start the movie or to watch the trailer, and the buttons have almost identical hierarchy on the UI.
For shows you need to dig deeper into three more screens. Here's a comparison:
A user (or users) wanting high-quality entertainment, trying to make the most of his leisure time, probably after a day of hard work, browsing the catalog to choose something to watch, and still undecided.
Reducing the time to access trailers to shorten time-to-engagement, particularly among undecided users who browse three or more titles per session.
In the video from the comparison above, you can see that finding the trailer can take up to 20 seconds. Multiply that by three options and you've already spent a full minute (the lenght of the typical trailer) just trying to find a few previews.
Add the affordance to play the show’s trailer by adding a button to the “More Info” screen.
A very important consideration is that shows, especially long ones, usually have more than one trailer. For simplicity I'd default to the first trailer of Season 1 and keep other teasers and trailers at the episodes level where they currently are. This supports the most common decision flow: "Do I want to start this series?".
One more thing to add is that while supporting the mentioned decision flow, I leave out of the scope supporting users who already started the show or are deeply into it; that's a conscious trade off based on the assumption that for those cases you don't need a trailer to decide if you want to continue watching.
So, no new UI components or previously unknown interactions required.
This hypothesis needs real data and research to test both, my assumptions and the proposed solution, which is a quick-win bet that could still be elevated by considering other adjustments at the Title details screen behavior and the overall browsing experience with mood recommendations—which are points 2 and 3 of this piece.
There's a strong chance to harness the autoplaying behavior in a less intrusive and more intentional way, let's dig into it.
Autoplay undermines exploration.
When you select a movie or a show from the catalog, you arrive to the Title details screen, where you can find more information, play the title, play the trailer… But after ~3 s the title auto-plays. This adds a false sense of urgency: the system assumes intent and overrides user's control and their ability to browse comfortably. It's subtly shifts from browsing to committing, which can feel jarring.
Viewers wanting to clarify their intent. Checking cast, runtime, parental rating, or simply gauging tone before a commitment. They’ve not expressed intent to start playback yet.