HBO GO was recently launched on Roku, and when my team and I at Huge approached designing for the Roku platform, we had one simple goal – make it the best looking app on Roku, period. This proved to be a harder challenge than we thought it would be, given the tight limitations of the templates available to us, and the speed at which we wanted to launch the product to the market. Of course, the main reference we had was Netflix, and there were a few things that we just had to change if we could stand using GO on Roku.

The first was the dreaded “talk bubble” info box. Actually a more complicated task than you’d think given the fixed nature of these templates, but with some assistance from Roku, we ended up with something that’s both more elegant and refined, and “feels” like HBO.

Design wasn’t the only problem – we also had to figure out the best way to replicate the way we were organizing the content on HBO GO into something that made sense on Roku. This meant many tests of different IAs, each optimized for a different way to navigate through the content stack. In the end, we decided on one approach that mixed both flat and hierarchical ways to browse content, which I think makes the best of HBO’s content library as well as the way people navigate on Roku.

So I hope all of you HBO GO users out there enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it.