Somewhere in the depths of Netflix, there’s a team whose primary responsibility is to make sure the bits move quickly. As Netflix serves its customers by streaming video, they ensure that video data leaves the server in a prompt and efficient manner.
This team is all about the performance of the servers and the networks. They talk in terms of bandwidth, throughput, latency, reliability, and efficiency. They are comfortably deep in the weeds of how all the data moves.
The members of this team are performance engineers. They are architecting, engineering, and maintaining the performance of a very complex system. It occupies all their time and then some. In systems engineering, there are few jobs more technical than these.
And yet, at the very moment that a Netflix viewer’s video stream stops and that spinning animation appears, indicating the player is now awaiting more data, these engineers make a dramatic change. They become user experience designers.
They made decisions about the system. Those decisions affected the bandwidth, throughput, latency, and reliability. Those decisions had a dramatic affect on that viewer’s user experience. They didn’t think of themselves as UX designers, and I’m betting no one else in the organization did either, yet, here they are, affecting the UX in a dramatic way.
