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How Netflix does A/B Testing

Jessie Chen
UX Collective

Have you ever wondered why Netflix has such a great streaming experience? Do you want to learn how they completed their homepage plus other UI layout redesigns through A/B testing? If so, then this article is for you!

I’ll start with sharing my takeaways from a Designers+Geeks event I attended last week at Yelp. The two great speakers Anna Blaylock and Navin Iyengar, both product designers at Netflix, walked through insights gleaned from their years of A/B testing on tens of millions of Netflix members, and showed some relevant examples from the product to help attendees think about their own designs.

Photo from the presentation

Experimentation

I really liked this first slide of the presentation and think it’s smart to use an image from the TV show “Breaking Bad” to explain the concept of experimentation!

Photo from the presentation

The Scientific Method

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Responses (41)

What are your thoughts?

ave you ever wondered why Netflix has such a great streaming experience? Do you want to learn how they completed their homepage plus other UI layout redesigns through A/B testing?

I find Netflix’s Apple TV experience to be absolutely terrible. My list sometimes shows up, sometimes doesn’t. Browsing my list requires a whole lot of scrolling to find anything.
And the recommendations? Usually terrible. Why doesn’t the front page just list the top rated recommendations? It’s bizarre.

This is so interesting, I had no idea Netflix had so many variations. The amount of influence a design, or a changed experience has on a user always astounds me.
It’s clear they have done some fabulous things with AB testing and increased engagement…