The pleasure of surprise
I’ve been using Quickflix for a while - one of Australia’s answers to Netflix and have had a very odd experience.
Every time they send me an email saying “We’ve just sent you xxxx” I think “Oh, cool, how exciting - I wanted to watch that”.
Now of course I wanted to watch it - they chose it from my queue of things I said I wanted to watch. But despite this being completely logical, I am excited every time I learn what is coming next.
This may be related to the paradox of choice - standing in the video store, making a decision from all the movies and wondering whether it is a dud. Somehow the element of surprise is quite different to this.
October 26th, 2006 at 12:42 am
You’re right, Quickflix appear to have given more than the minimum amount of thought to the user experience, and where people’s seducible moments are. When i was unsubscribing from the service, the system tried to bribe me back to becoming a customer by offering me two free Hoyts movie passes!
Flattering but ineffective in retaining me