[Sigia-l] Throttling UX

[Jared M. Spool]

At 05:34 PM 2/17/2006, Listera wrote:
>Legality of promises/fulfillment aside, you think it's "best practice" to
>specifically throttle the UX of your most dedicated users? Would you
>redesign navigation, rearrange workflows, give preferential treatment to
>database queries, reorder search result sets, etc, in hopes of evening out
>usage patterns?

Netflix has had a problem with people taking better advantage of their 
services than originally expected from the very beginning. It's been an 
issue that Reed Hastings (CEO/Founder) and others have talked about 
continually. Their costs for processing each returned DVD is still too high 
for anyone's liking. It's something they acknowledge they need to work on.

Netflix also prides themselves on their referral rate. 85% of people who 
sign up say they signed up because of a friend or family member's 
recommendation. 93% of existing customers say they've recently referred the 
service to a friend. Netflix uses these metrics as key performance 
indicators. ( 
http://hubmagazine.com/archives/the_hub/2006/jan_feb/the_hub10_netflix.pdf 
) As a result, they've seen 20 straight quarters of greater than 50% growth.

As Andrew correctly pointed out, these heavy users are going to be key 
influencers when it comes to word-of-mouth advertising. Keeping these 
people happy, even at a loss of immediate revenue will likely pay off big 
for them.

Netflix invests very little in advertising. Spending that money on 
increasing word-of-mouth is a worthwhile investment.

That's how I think Netflix will resolve the problem.

Jared


Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
4 Lookout Lane, Unit 4d, Middleton, MA 01949
978 777-9123   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks