Case study: An “o”de to great characters
With the recent news that WarnerMedia is going to be dropping its entire 2021 slate of movies on HBO Max the same day as their theatrical releases, I was delighted to hear that they finally got a deal done with Roku this week. Now, I can seamlessly watch all their great content on my big screen.
I’ve been using HBO Max since it first debuted back in May, so I thought this was a perfect time to try out a small tweak to the first screen users see when opening the app, no matter the platform — the select profile/avatar screen. Here’s a look at the current avatar screen.
As you can see, it’s very clean and clear, if perhaps a little on the plain side. On other platforms, such as Netflix or Disney+, users can select a fun avatar (based on each respective company’s most popular characters), so I thought to myself: what might it look like if HBO Max did something similar?
I can’t imagine that they’re not thinking about this already, because it’s a huge opportunity to make the entire experience a little more fun. Since WarnerMedia has some of the most iconic characters of all time in their company’s portfolio, it would be a shame to not take advantage of them for this purpose.
The one thing I didn’t want to do was simply throw the character avatars up there, just like every other service. I wanted to slightly differentiate them in a way that was interesting and subtle. Here’s where I landed (can you tell what the subtle part is?):
For this concept, I picked two HBO characters (Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano) and one major WB character, Batman (of course, for myself). I broke the user’s name out of the original gradient ring and placed it below the avatar for practical purposes (I wonder how they deal with long names — smaller size fonts?), but also to give each profile picture some breathing room.
The subtle differentiation between my redesign concept and other services is I chose to substitute these character avatars in for the “filled” center circle within the iconic “O” of HBO’s wordmark. If you kind of blur your eyes, the homage is a bit more obvious, but I wanted to give a nod to the prestigious namesake of this new service. I used the same purple they use in their branding, but dialed down the transparency to put the focus on the characters and to give the screen a slightly more distinguished feel vs. the purple gradient from the original rings.
I’m super excited to see what HBO Max has in store for the future, both content-wise and design-wise. There’s a lot of opportunity for them to take their massive library of characters and make the service into a true Netflix competitor. Hopefully they’re already working on something like this now — because I really, really want to be Batman.
