Case study: Adding a control timer feature to Netflix
By: Juliette Gaboriau
Tags: UX Design, Case Study, Netflix, Prototyping, Features

What are the context and the problem?

Who, in your entourage, has not subscribed to Netflix or another SVOD service? Today, there is a SVOD market in France that is continuously growing with more and more new players (Disney +, Apple TV, Amazon Prime etc.)

Netflix has established itself as the market leader. In fact, in 2019, more than half of SVOD users in France were customers of Netflix (Barometer of Video-on-Demand — September 2019 by the CNC).

These platforms have transformed our consumption habits. They are increasingly pushing us to overconsumption of video content, with bingewatching as a widespread practice.

These changes in our screen consumption are also linked to the huge increase of the number of devices (5.5 per household) in a societal environment that pushes us to consume screen. This necessarily induces risks in terms of mental and physical health (isolation, dependence, inactivity, etc.)

Today, any SVOD platform has the ability to manage screen time. In comparison, other apps like YouTube, Facebook and iOS from Apple launched their control timer service.

Youtube (left), Facebook (center), IOS (right)

In this context, how to help and support Netflix users in their consumption of streaming content?

Users aware of their irrational consumption

To better understand this problem, we must take an interest in Netflix users to learn more about their consumption habits and their relationship to their screen time. I had the opportunity to interview various users, analyze this data and identify four key findings.

Guilty feeling

“I have often felt guilty about doing nothing during a day…”

Lost of time

“I spent the day in front of Netflix and I didn’t do anything all day!”

Lack of priority

“I’ve already declined an event with my friends for Netflix, in order to stay comfortable.”

Awareness

“I know I spend a lot of time on my phone and especially on Netflix.”

Let the users decide to improve their daily life

To transform this irrational consumption and moderate this feeling of guilt, the idea is to give the user control of his screen time and to leave him the choice and the decision to improve his daily life, while accompanying and advising him. Through an ideation workshop, I developed a feature accessible from the user’s account with several options:

Define my screen time: the user can define a similar screen time every day or customize depending on the days of the week ; he can add a reminder that is showed when half of their total screen time is reached.

the user can define a similar screen time every day or customize depending on the days of the week ; he can add a reminder that is showed when half of their total screen time is reached. Reminder me to take a break: the user can define the frequency of his break by selecting the number of hours and minutes and round to the current episode or movie to show the reminder.

the user can define the frequency of his break by selecting the number of hours and minutes and round to the current episode or movie to show the reminder. Automatic reading of the next episode

Global vision of its consumption: the user can see his overall consumption depending on the days ; he can also see his daily average screen time per week and changes in his consumption.

Final version : scenario with Marine, my ideal persona

Marine is 22 years old, she is a student in a business school and lives in the Paris region. She went back home and wanted to watch the first episode of a new series. She had only one hour, before starting to study for her midterms, which are coming soon. Few hours laters, she realizes it’s 2:00 in the morning and she’s still on Netflix and missed all the things she had to do … One time too many!

The next day, she will decide to take charge of herself and will go into the settings of the application … To discover her user flow, it’s here 👇 :

Iterate

From my low-fidelity to my high-fidelity prototype, this challenge showed us the benefits of the test phases in order to iterate on my prototype and improve it to satisfy the needs of end users. So, I followed the aesthetic of the application and the design elements to respect the user flow.

Iterate on the options and their titles

Iterate on consistency and representation of elements

Iterate on the feedback

What’s next

I would like to further improve the user experience with :