Hulu announced that is will come out with a revamped home screen that’s much closer in line with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other streaming services. The new design will roll out to some Roku and Apple TV users right away, with everyone else getting the update by the end of July. The company will be taking feedback from tvOS and Roku customers and tweaking the new design as it continues to roll out more broadly over the next few months. “We know that we have one of the largest libraries available, and we need to make sure that we’re creating the platform for people to navigate through that, and understand the breadth of that content, that offering, without it being overwhelming,” VP of Product Management at Hulu, Jim Denney at Hulu said.
Hulu underwent a large redesign in 2017, during which it replaced the traditional horizontal of content with a vertically scrolling landing page, featuring enveloping, full-screen artwork for each show or movie. Though the update helped differentiate Hulu from other streaming services, it also overcomplicated the user interface, with many viewers stating they didn’t like the reinvention and that it lacked efficiency as the lineup only showed three or four selections on-screen at a time, and even less on mobile devices. Receiving constant feedback about it seemingly striving for a sleek design at the cost of easy accessibility, the company continued to work on the design, making its menus easier to read. “When we launched the current experience three years or so ago, it was a pretty radical change,” admits Jason Wong, Hulu’s Director of Product Management. “I think a standard has emerged as people have adopted streaming, it’s evident, and not just within the Disney family,” he continues. “We know that the majority of users have between three to five different services, and I think all of them employ this orientation on the living room devices.”
Hulu continues to make use of its editorial imagery to highlight select titles and now uses a variety of tile sizes to communicate information about the content it recommends. There are still touches of the 2017 design in Hulu’s latest release. Denney is moving towards a more user-friendly that will feel more familiar to people coming from another streaming app, including Disney’s other apps Disney Plus and ESPN Plus. “Viewers can now navigate through collections vertically and explore within a collection by moving horizontally,” Denney said in a blog post co-written with Jason Wong, Hulu’s director of product management.
There is, however, “room for change,” according to Denney, and overall navigation is getting much more intuitive. The company also plans to simplify its top-level navigation, moving categories like “TV,” “Movies” and “Sports” to the top of the screen, to make it easier for users to drill down into the type of content they watch. “Categories of content like TV, movies, and sports will be moved to the master navigation, which gives our viewers a clear pathway to find what they’re looking for," Denney said.