I’m pleased to see that Netflix has implemented one of the design improvements that the study led by my former PhD student Dr. Borke Obada-Obieh recommended. Back in 2020, we have published study results at CHI ’20, the top HCI venue. Just before the conference (and weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic) Borke and I presented the study at Netflix headquarters. This is what we wrote in our paper:
Our other recommendations included the following:
- Help primary users to remember which accounts they share and with whom, and help them to end sharing if needed.
- Allow users to label devices as primary or secondary.
- Allow users to limit the duration of a sign in.
- Ensure that the primary user always stays in control of the account.
- Provide an option of equal account sharing.
- Support password-less sharing of account personal content.
- Support granting of fine-grained permissions to other users.
- Design household utility accounts with multiple users in mind.
- Support household accounts on shared devices.
Detailed discussion of our recommendations (along with technical details of the study) can be found in the paper itself:
Obada-Obieh B, Huang Y, Beznosov K. “The burden of ending online account sharing” In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2020 Apr 21 (pp. 1-13).
If you just want to get the gist of the study and its results, you can watch Borke’s 12-minute presentation at CHI ’20:
or just a 2-minute video summary: