maxdome

Entscheidungs-Unterstützung: user research pointed to two ways to differentiate maxdome from its global competitors. One was preventing users from having to scroll through thousands of titles, formulated in the idea of ‘Entscheidungs-Unterstützung’, (literally ‘taking the helplessness out of decision making’). The other was building on maxdome’s heritage, packaging the content to be more relevant to German audiences. These two differentiators led to the concept of ‘maxperten’ – maxdome’s experts – highly visible, human curators to guide viewers around the content.

Product evolution: taking this concept, we worked with maxdome’s internal product development and editorial teams, designing and testing an experience that provided the audience with a range of human-driven recommendation mechanics. We defined how the product could evolve over the next three years, setting out a roadmap for how to achieve that progression from a starting point of a minimum viable product.

The redesigned maxdome site brings a unique proposition to video on demand – it emphasises a very human touch in the way it invites users to navigate and explore. It delivers a product with personality, leading users to re-interpret popular content, while less well known content is surfaced in new ways.

We designed the platforms to be consistent with a simple navigation that enabled viewers to browse the catalogue easily to choose what to watch.

We created a mixture of collection types with clear rules about when each should be used to allow editors to set up pages and deliver the content in the most effective ways for maxdome's audience.

The human curators did not completely remove the need for technology – in the product there are still traditional metadata and algorithms but there is a clear emphasis on human recommendations, in which the maxperten guide viewers through the interface.