Netflix’s UX Design Is Keeping Us Up at Night
How prestige TV + binge-worthy design created the site that never sleeps
By Madeleine Morley
Netflix is keeping us awake. I’m not talking about its latest gameshow Awake: The Million Dollar Game, where contestants must stay awake for 24 hours while repeating tedious challenges in order to win mountains of cash — though what I am talking about is oddly similar in its combination of money, entertainment, and a deliberate lack of sleep.
Netflix is keeping us awake and it’s doing so through seamless, intensely personalized consumer pathways that urge us to binge, and then binge some more. Netflix has said as much itself: In 2017 the company’s CEO declared that its biggest competitor was not Amazon, Hulu, or HBO Go — but rather, sleep. This was, of course, a marketing stunt (the headlines practically wrote themselves) but not one without a certain amount of truth to it.
For broadcast television, prime time viewing is between 8–11 p.m. For Netflix’s 148 million subscribers, peak viewing…
