UIEtips Article: Taking the Netflix Experience to a New Level — An Interview with Sean Kane
December 17th, 2007
If you had a chance to build your user experience design team from scratch, what would you do? Where would you focus your resources? What would you do first?
That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder of a new company, GetListed, where he is constructing his UX team from the ground up.
At Netflix, Sean had resources most of us could only dream of: a top-notch team, a wealth of user data, and a management team that truly understands how UX can play an important role. Under his watch, the site grew 14-fold, so he knows what he’s doing.
Yet, as many of us know, there are challenges to being in a small organization with limited resources and only a sliver of real data about who the users will be. So, we’re watching closely as Sean brings his talents, skills, and experience to his new venture.
In this issue of UIEtips, Sean shares with us his initial efforts to bootstrapping his user experience team. He talks about how he’s building the GetListed team and his initial strategy for creating a world-class design, much like he did at Netflix.
Have you assessed your team’s capabilities? What techniques have you used? Are there skills you think are important that aren’t on the list? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.
[Sean will be updating us on his adventure at the Web App Summit 2008, in San Diego, CA, March 26-28. We've already started to fill up, but there's a few seats left. You'll want to register soon because this event will sell out.You can see the entire program, and find out how to get your free limited-edition red iPod nano by registering by December 18th, by visiting the the Summit site.]
December 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I have built three very successful user experience teams and am back at a startup on my own again now. I agree with Sean absolutely that it is most important to get really smart people in the door above and beyond specific skillsets or experience with particular functionality. Every application of our talents will involve iterative design and learning from our mistakes, an smart people do this inately. I also agree that networking is a great way to find good people to talk to. Finally, I have used a case study in the past to more objectively compare applicants, and it has worked out pretty well. Applicants that did better on my carefully administered case study have also performed better.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I love Netflix’s site and the experience of using it. However, I’ve often wondered about some of the choices they’ve made with regard to their primary navigation - so much so that I (somewhat arrogantly) took a stab at redesigning it: http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000860.php
Do any of my suggestions hit home, or am I way off base?
As far as hiring the right people is concerned, networking is the way to go. Find out who the great people are to work with and then hire them.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Great topic for an article. I’ve assembled two UE teams, one at a start-up and the other within a large corporation. A factor the article doesn’t address is team size. Staffing three positions is obviously different than fifteen, the former putting a higher premium on generalists. (I prefer generalists regardless of the team size. My experience is that “super bright people” end up working in multiple areas over time.) Start-ups introduce issues of their own. I’ve hired bright and talented people who couldn’t handle the thrash and uncertainty of building a team/product/company. Big mistake. I now evaluate personality and work style before touching on specific skills and experience. Creating designs from scratch is liberating… but also scary. You need people who value creative freedom over predictability.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“…Netflix’s award-winning web user interface, which was rated #1 in customer satisfaction by independent researchers five consecutive times.”
Do you have a citation for this? I would like to reference this at the company I work for and they will ask me who the independent researchers are.
Like Amazon, Netflix is another example of an extremely successful company that understands how to turn user research into gold by “letting data prove everything.” Hats off to them, and let us leverage their successes to help us make the business case for user research and user centered design at the companies we work for.