My Best Experiments at Netflix

July 2021

Dear Readers,Never in a million years did I think I would lead on the team helping Netflix grow to half a billion users. Not because I didn’t know I could, more of you never know where your life will take you.As a Growth Designer at Netflix, my goal is to convert as many new non-members and former members to paid subscribers as possible. Yes, that is a huge task, but I have access to many resources and the best colleagues. I also get to work across our various platforms, TV, Web, and iOS/Android. One of my first projects was a massive update to our NMHP(Non-member homepage) on TV. This page has not been updated in over ten years! And before I joined the team, they had already spent a year on the test. To put it in layman's terms, I was coming in as the closer. It's the bottom of the ninth inning, man on third, and Fonz is at-bat. Did he get a hit, or did he strike out... Stay tuned and see!Fonz MorrisNetflix Lead Product Design, Conversion

Backstory

You’re in your living room looking at the TV on the wall. You navigate to the Netflix app with your remote control for the first time. What do you see? A grid of boxes with enticing titles of popular movies and shows. This collage is dynamically generated and filled with localized titles. The design team didn’t need to produce any of what you're seeing.

^ The original video app landing page hadn't been changed in ten years.

Prospective TV app customers have seen this landing page for ten-plus years with no real issue. My first question was, well, why are we even updating this? I was always taught, “don’t fix what ain’t broke.” One word: video. 

Video is a more compelling medium for persuasion than static content. (Have you noticed the growth of video ads? Yep.) We wanted to test the video persuasion hypothesis on the TV nonmember landing page. Goodbye static image grid, hello video concepts! Would video convert more new customer sign-ups launching the TV app? Now the billion-dollar question is, how do we produce this?

Concept Research

We asked prospective customers to help us evaluate five video concepts in one-on-one interviews. 

We learned that concepts that were more informative about Netflix's service performed better. Also, showcasing the breadth of content helped participants better understand Netflix. A range was more compelling than a significant focus on a particular popular title.

With this info, we decided to do quantitative variant tests with Concept B, Concept E, against the current grid homepage as a control.

Results

After running this test, we found the video to be a clear winner in terms of signups and realized revenue, with Concept B driving the largest impact. Concept B was the best performing asset and the video we plan on showing to the world! Concept B is a highlight reel of media assets by genre that showcases hundreds of titles in rapid-fire with a voiceover track.

^ Concept B was the winner that uses video to show a huge library of content and text with voice-over to describe more information about the Netflix service itself.

Another bonus was that we estimated that B generates $30 million of additional revenue, a higher incremental yearly revenue when compared to the others. And, it was cheaper to maintain since it relied on dynamic content generation and voice-over versus a more produced video ad concept.

This experiment took years of work backed by a large team of people. I am happy to say we successfully productized the video, and rolled it out to our global audience base. If you log out of your Netflix app on your TV, you will see the updated video! I guess it's safe to say not only did we get a hit, but we also hit a home run!

About the Author

Fonz Morris is an entrepreneur and self-taught designer. Since 2020, Fonz Morris has been a Lead Product Designer at Netflix. Before joining Netflix, he led a design team at Coursera. In his free time, he enjoys collecting sneakers and jumping rope with his daughter.

Growth Design Fellows can chat about this month's newsletter topic with Fonz.

• When: Fri, Jul 9 at 3:00 PST. 

• What: Agenda

• Fellows premium community is currently not accepting new members due to capacity.

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