Design an onboarding experience for Netflix

Onboarding question

Interviewer (I) - Design an onboarding experience for Netflix.

Candidate (C) - By onboarding, I assume you’re asking me to design the experience for a user who signs up for Netflix for the first time. 

I - Yes, that’s right.

C - Sure. I also want to look at the goals of this onboarding. What is our primary objective of this onboarding? What do we want the user to do? I’m going to assume that the primary goal is to provide enough value to a new user so that they convert to a paid user.

I - Yes, go on.

C - Let’s get into some details. What will get a user to become a paid user of Netflix? A user will want to pay for Netflix if they derive value out of the experience. This boils down to

1. Minimize the steps for a first time user to get to the content they want to see.

2. Provide a good enough reason for them to keep coming back to Netflix. 

There are several ways to achieve point 2 above. 

Off the top of my head, I can think of :

a. Personalized recommendations

b. Include a social feed

c. Personalized email campaigns / retargeted ads

Would you like to me go deeper into one of these?’

I - Let’s go with personalized recommendations.

C - Sure. Before I get into the onboarding journey, I want to talk about what will bring a user to Netflix. There are 2 options

1. The user is searching for a particular show/movie and lands into Netflix.

2. The user just wants to try out the Netflix experience and visits the home page.

Would you like me to design for both these scenarios?

I - Let’s go with option 2. The user simply wants to check out Netflix.

C - Cool. Here’s how the onboarding experience would look like keeping in mind the 2 goals I’d outlined above. As far as possible, I’m going to try and keep the steps in the journey skippable so that the user can start watching content quickly. Even though these steps are skippable, they need to be included in the onboarding as it will help Netflix understand the user’s preferences and will help provide accurate recommendations to the user. 

1. Land into Netflix 

2. Get user details

   1. Just email id will do 

3. Get them started on the free trial (Put the user on the highest plan and no need to take credit card info)

   1. Ask them a few questions to build recommendations that are relevant to them (all skippable)

      1. Enter your top 5 fav movies of all time

      2. Enter preferred genres (min 2)

      3. Enter fav actors

   2. If they skip the step above, show them that region’s top 10 so that they can browse and pick a show to get started. We could autoplay previews of the top 10 but I am not going to suggest it as I personally find this irritating and this will most probably overwhelm a first time user.

4. Most B2C subscription apps take in the user’s credit card information as one of the first steps and auto charge the card when the trial period is about to expire. I’ve taken a slightly different approach here as I’ve assumed that the user will sign up if they find value in their trial.

Number of clicks to start watching content

Min - 1 (Enter email id) 

Max - 2 (Enter email id + recommendations)

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Post interview analysis

What did the candidate do well?

1. Good definition of goals

2. Structured thinking

What could the candidate have done better?

1. The candidate only picked one way to segment which was region. They could have picked talked about more segmentation options. For example, if they were able to select “Login via Facebook”, Netflix could read the Facebook profile information to make recommendations.