Kids & Family Experience

Background:
With the launch of HBO Max upon us, we had the opportunity to appeal to an entirely new audience: Kids. We believed we could increase retention by offering more content to targeted age groups.

Problem:
HBO is historically known for its premium adult content. We had both a challenge and an opportunity to create a different narrative.

Role:
Lead Product Designer - Collaborated on writing use cases, scenarios, and user stories. Facilitated ideation sessions, mapped out user journeys. Participated in UX research sessions. Designed flows, created wireframes and prototypes for the home page, character pages, player, and the parent dashboard.

Discovery
I lead an ideation session and subsequent workshops to think through what the kids and family experience could be like. Ideas obtained from these working sessions helped shape core scenarios, use cases, and user journeys.

We looked at a range of user journeys, pulling out key moments we wanted to lean in to.

UXR Experience Review Sessions
In collaboration with the research team, we conducted interview sessions to run through variations on each age group’s home screen and the parent dashboard. Most parents placed emphasis on show ratings and what their kids should/should not see.

“Tell me if a show aligns with my values. I don’t want my kid seeing anything that’s not appropriate”

The results of these sessions helped drive design decisions and prioritize the order in which we designed upcoming features.

The Approach

Goals of the experience:

• Provide autonomy with control

• Create a safe environment

• UX that evolves with age (Content matures with the child)

• A focus on co-viewing with family

• Provide extra parental tools for control

We completed competitive analysis across services: Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Paramount+, Apple TV, and Disney. There were a lot of really rich kids experiences to use as inspiration. The Takeaway: trends were showing bigger, brighter graphics and simplistic navigation for most age ranges. We weren’t seeing anyone who’s experience evolved with kids’ ages. This highlighted an opportunity for us.

Flows
I continued down the exploration path by sketching out some flows. I looked at first time setup, core kids pages, and the return experience for the parent dashboard.

I created sketches and wireframes for each phase of the work stream: a home screen for each age range, the player, character pages, and the parent dashboard.

We tested 2 rows of characters for the youngest group: ages 2-5. Customers showed a preference for one row of characters, which is what we ended up launching with. We explored lots of different color palettes and a simplified navigation for the younger age groups. For the older kids, we explored maturing the experience with different content groupings and the full navigation. We found that the primary way kids navigated was through the character row. There was less of a reliance on navigation to get to the content kids wanted to watch. This lead to us deciding to keep the character row for the younger age groups and keeping the navigation the same for all age groups.

Launch
We decided to place focus on the character pages as the differentiator rather than changing the UI for each age group due to technical constraints and the launch timeline. The content maturing with the child and styling of key parts of the page allowed us to target each age group.

What did we learn?
We continued to do UXR after the launch of the kids & family experience. We needed to better understand customer sentiment and how it was effecting retention.

The Results
Both retention and acquisition were trending in the right direction, though it was difficult to tell exactly what contributed to this given that it was an entirely new platform. Feedback on the experience was great (for those that were aware that HBO max had a kids experience). We struggled with getting the word out there and early adoption suffered as a result. This did even out over time (the longer it was in market), and became the base experience that is live in Max today. Below is a recording of a snapshot of the in-market experience for HBO Max.