Qwikster: What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate

If Netflix had given as much thought to their change management & communication strategy as they (historically) did to their overall user experience they could have been successful in their Qwikster spin-off.

I say that as someone who has spent the last 9 months focusing on designing change management experiences. It’s been an eye-opening adventure! Typically i’ve been focused on designing enduring experiences, mainly websites, for people to use from now to the end of time. Focusing instead on transient experiences intended to help people overcome changes to something they use a lot, know and love brings different challenges. I’ve spent a lot of time combining traditional UX tools (personas, content inventories, task analysis, etc.) with newer techniques like KANO analysis to …

Build a catalog of the changes.
Understand how each change will be perceived by each persona.
Position how we would like each change to be perceived.
Design a cross-channel experience to communicate the changes (before, during and after they happen).

However, all this takes a lot of thought. If Netflix had gone through a process like this I think they could have achieved their goals without upsetting as many people and without ultimately having to back down.

A More Mauvy Shade of Pinky Russet