Explicit Signals/User Ratings (2025)
A clear sign of the increasing sophistication of streaming video users is their strong desire to have some control over the algorithm that controls what they see and don’t see. Over the years we have consistently seen not only a clear understanding of how algorithms work, but also a deep frustration with being pigeonholed or at the mercy of a black box system. It had been my dream for years to create a system to give users some power in the process of choosing and prioritizing content. Giving them the ability to rate things that they liked or disliked was the first step along this very important road.
Project in a Nutshell
My Role:
Product Design Manager/Project Lead: As the design lead for both the Content Detail pages and the user actions (add to list, download, etc.), this feature fell largely within my purview, though had fairly critical impacts on our algorithms/personalization designers as well. I was tapped as the point person for the project all-up and served as the point person for the design strategy of the feature and coordinated efforts across our two teams for research, ideation, and design (UX, Visual, motion) of both the in-app experience, but also the downstream affects of users rating content. I also served as the voice of the project, presenting to executive leadership and advocating for the feature in prioritization discussions.
Customer Impact:
I moved to Scotland just before launch, so don’t have any direct insight into how the feature is doing, but I strongly believe that what we delivered was key to solving these major customer pain points:
Dissatisfaction With Personalization: Only 58% of users indicate satisfaction with personalization and recommendations on Max, indicating they are not aligned with their taste and preferences.
Desire to Hide Content: •The 'Ability to Hide Content' feature ranks 3rd among customer-requested CX features, representing 10% of all feature requests
Desire for Control: •Among the 20% of users who expressed dissatisfaction with recommendations, 30% wanted the ability to customize their recommendations
Most Fun:
Thinking a LOT about thumbs! Prior to this project I had paid little attention to the variety of approaches one can take with the design of a thumbs up/down and how an additional pixel of width or angle of the thumb can make the difference between looking blobby vs like an actual hand. For the record, I am 100% #teamknucklenubs.
Biggest Challenge:
Keeping this on the radar of the leadership team. There was always a lot competing for attention and our limited development resources (we launched in dozens of additional countries in the same time period we were planning this feature!), so I needed to thread the needle of working with my product partners to advocate for this important and highly sought feature, without being tunnel-visioned on my own features to the detriment of the bigger picture (and even some of my other features). I think we accomplished this well. We used our close relationships and years of earned trust to keep this on the roadmap and continued to get it elevated until it was fully committed to.
What I’d Do Differently:
I would have more strongly advocated for including the feature in the end-card from the very beginning. We ultimately got it in there, but there was some back and forth that could have been avoided if I had been more forceful in my conviction that that might be THE moment where users would feel compelled to rate a title.
Early Days
The idea of incorporating user ratings certainly wasn’t new. We had been talking about it since the HBO NOW days, as a way of learning a bit more about customer preferences, and then again at the launch of (the original) HBO Max when I designed the multi-user profile feature and we could then target an individual instead of all account members. And even more recently, some of our designers had done further investigation into the different systems used by other services (thumbs up/down, stars, numerical, etc.) and the pros and cons of each. In each case, the idea would gain attention, initial work would begin, and then eventually interest from the executive level would wane as other priorities demanded attention from the design team.
In 2023, though, the stars aligned where I now led design for the bulk of features that were involved in delivery of a robust explicit signals. I had been at the helm of user actions (my list, downloads, continue watching, etc.) for over a year and now also had the detail pages too. I also was highly motivated to get this project moving, as it was the obvious first step in my longly held desire to give users the control over their recommendations that they had been asking for at least since around 2018 when I was first doing research into the Profiles feature.
To kick things off, I worked with my product partners to assess whether there was room within our roadmap to focus on explicit signals and if there was any appetite among product leadership to tackle it right now. There were always many projects vying for our attention, and that moment was no different. However, we decided that it was worth proposing as one of about three large efforts going on at that moment. With that decision made, we started resuscitating some of the older but still quite good work that had been done prior to us being involved, and dug more deeply into existing research to identify any gaps we needed to fill prior to fully settling on goals and scope.
