HBO.com Redesign

Driving Engagement & Subscription

SUMMARY

From 2014 – 2017, HBO’s Experience Design team played a critical role in the re-design and development of the network’s marketing-centric website. Over 20,000 unique pages, the site is a showcase of HBO, its movies, franchises, and personalities.

Nearly seven years since its previous design and strategy, the challenge was threefold:

Embrace a modern, daily (possibly hourly) editorial cadence, built on a new CMS
Enable a multi-channel subscription and purchase path
Support the complex needs of long-form franchises (e.g. Game of Thrones), and their bespoke “microsites.”

Highlighting its ever-changing media programming and purchase options, the site had both increased cross‐device engagement as well as increased traffic to the product subscription funnel by 30% (+36M unique visitors annually). True to our vision, it’s a dynamic, evolving platform, providing a strong foundation for years to come.

Challenge

Bring HBO’s web presence out of the early 2000’s, with a modern, responsive, and efficient site. Lay the groundwork for an increasing emphasis on subscription funnel and direct-to-consumer conversion, while enabling shared content between promotion and streaming platforms.

Approach

Achieve progress over time, by developing the site in three distinct phases: Transition from Flash to HTML5, Establish a new CMS/server architecture, and Modernize the UX. Use principles of Atomic Design to enable future cross-platform publishing, while optimizing the CMS UX to maintain design systems and structures.

Success

The finished platform has increased traffic to our subscription funnel by 30% (in six months). The team is well on track to hit and improve upon additional KPI’s, while the Atomic Structures and data models are planned to make their way into our streaming products by Q4 2018.

Role

Design Architect
Creative Direction