As streaming catalogs continue to expand, customers increasingly face a paradox: They want more choice, but too much choice makes discovery harder.
Conversational Experiences explores how natural language interactions could simplify content discovery within HBO Max.
Rather than requiring users to know exactly what they want to watch and navigate traditional search interfaces, the initiative investigated how AI-powered conversations could support searching the catalog through natural language.
Conversational Search is available on the Mobile Android Platform.
Outcomes
Especially on the TV, searching for the content you love is a chore typing out letter by letter using a remote. On top of that traditional tech powering keyword based search doesn’t do a stellar job understanding natural language or have the ability to deeply understand linguistic variation. With conversational search, we believe that we can make the task of searching easier and give people better recommendations based on vague and abstract concepts, leading to higher engagement and increasing the depth of the catalog that people watch.
Measuring Success
For a 0-1 initiative there are always interesting things to measure:
- Awareness- which initiatives result in people trying the feature?
- User acquisition- how many people are engaging and how are they getting there?
- User engagement- what is their experience like what they get there? How many turns do they take and do they result in playback?
- User retention- do they come back and how often?
(As of this writing it’s too early to have any substantial data)
My Role
Discovery Strategy
Served as a design lead responsible for helping define how conversational experiences could transform content discovery across HBO Max. My work with the project started in early stage discovery and ideation cycles. I designed and lead a series of workshops for the purpose of exploring what a conversational experience might be like, what the important human factors are, and created concepts for early stage user research stimuli exploring how people think about AI and AI powered solutions. These workshops included ideation, concept development, storytelling, and conversational discovery exploration.
Future-State Vision
Developed concepts exploring:
- Active conversation discovery
- Natural language recommendation systems
- AI-assisted search
- Conversational onboarding
- Discovery throughout the viewing lifecycle
The work focused on how users could discover content through intent rather than navigation.
Workshop Facilitation & Concept Development
Led and facilitated workshops focused on:
- Discovery behaviors
- Search problems
- Conversational opportunities
- AI-enhanced discovery systems
Executive Storytelling
Created strategic narratives, models, and visual frameworks to explain:
- Why conversational experiences matter
- How customer behavior shifts
- Discovery pain points
- Future opportunities for AI-powered experiences
This work helped align Product, Design, Engineering, and leadership teams around a long-term vision.