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:
Support transfer of user profiles from an existing to a new account. This would reduce the effort needed to transfer profiles and recommendations to new accounts when sharing ends. For instance, when a secondary user of a Netflix-like service is ending account sharing and wants to create their own account with the same provider, the provider could offer the option of transferring the profile to the new account. The transfer can be done by “linking” the old profile to the new account or by exporting the profile data to the user, who can import it into the new account later. This would help users keep their personal preferences, history, movie lists, etc. This is related to the suggestion by Park et al. [40] for romantic relationship maintenance. We go further by offering a more concrete design recommendation. We also note that such support may not only benefit relationship maintenance but could also aid the ending of account sharing. Such a feature could reduce the burden of “branching off” a shared account, which might increase the likelihood a user would continue with the same service provider, rather than switching to a competitor.
p. 8
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:
