HULU — SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
Now that Disney had purchased a majority in hulu, one of the most urgent goals was to stay relevant alongside the expansive and top-ranking catalogue that Disney had to offer. Hulu has more and more original programming as well as an ever-growing library of circulating titles that just weren’t getting noticed. We looked at ‘low hanging fruit’ when it came to optimizing the search experience without reinventing the wheel (avoid excessive re-coding involving the search bar, search keyboard, landscape ratio movie cards, etc.—keep all that virtually the same.)
Our overall answer to this was a more robust experience when it came to EXPLORATION. The current search experience was lackluster at best. Especially when it came to searching for a specific actor/actress. Not much to see above the fold. Ryan Gosling isn’t even in “Endless The Movie” either. And why call out that your product doesn’t offer a popular ROMCOM like “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” if the user didn’t mention it in the first place?
We toyed with a Mind Map to throw out features we’d like to see above the fold and beyond. Our main assumption was that the meta data was already baked in to help us string the path points together from finding info about an actor/actress through to other roles, costar information, etc.
From these ideas, we pulled our top goals:
Bio of Actor/Actress with headshot and linkable details.
Movies available from said performer available on hulu…and show this data with minimal scrolling.
Call outs for co-stars. Connecting the dots between performances over to other actors/actresses as well as other titles.
Offering a more explorative experience looking at new titles.
Here is our result:
Up comes the actor’s headshot, description and quick text list of movies he or she have been in. Right below that, movie badges arranged horizontally with only titles showing graphically within image. Below that, co-stars from other movies. That gets us curious about their roles…
Notice how movie badges next to a co-star’s headshot aren’t necessarily called out by titles. That should get a customer curious. Once selected, the name for the movie is called out. What period-piece movie is that? Scrolling over the right customers will see it’s from the movie “The Favourite” because the title will pop up.
Scrolling to the headshot of Emma Stone will pop up just a few brief details about her.
If this badge is selected…it’s on to more information about Emma Stone and more co-stars, similar titles, etc. (see below)
