For the first time in more than a decade, Roku is overhauling its home screen in an effort to drive more interactivity and showcase relevant content and apps to its users, with more dynamic and personalized functionality.
“The new home screen will lean toward customization, while making sure it retains the simplicity it’s known for,” said Rocco Vice President of Scene Product Preston Smalley, speaking at a press conference in New York on Wednesday morning. “We sat down with our founder, Anthony Wood, our CEO, and really talked about what does this mean for the company? What does it mean for him? What does it mean for him?”
“We haven’t changed that in a decade, so we identified that, and we were really clear about that,” he continued. “Then we brought together the broad team, the design, the analytics, the engineering, the brand advertising, the AI people, and so we brought them all together and said, ‘Look, this is what we’re trying to achieve,’ and we let the data be our guide, and we researched, and we tried different things, and we brainstormed, and we did discovery, and where we ended up wasn’t necessarily where we started, but it was always guided by the same principles and values that we had at the beginning.”
Big Changes: Your most used apps will now be highlighted more clearly, reducing the need to search for specific streaming services. There will also be a “Top Picks for You” section that recommends apps and programs Roku thinks you’ll enjoy, and a large “specific” ad spot that can promote apps or offers.
There will also be genre-based destinations based on your usage habits and subscriptions.
Roku City will also get its own box for quick access to the screensaver, which will now get an interactive overhaul. Roku will launch a curated “Daily Scoop” featuring cultural shows and trends.
There will also be changes to bread-and-butter functions like search, menus, and shortcuts.
“Simplicity is and always will be our north star at Roku, and it wasn’t about reinventing Roku — although we looked at some wild ideas initially to consider — but we really wanted to keep the platform special, so it became more about optimization,” said Margaret Schmidt, vice president of user experience design and research at Roku. “How do we evolve it organically? How do we make it smarter, more useful, more content-focused and useful in that way, without it seeming more complicated.”
The new home screen platform will also be able to adapt to how families use Rokus. “This is one of the last remaining shared devices, the television in the home, and we know there are many people living in homes,” Smalley says.
So a Roku device in a kid’s playroom might have a different home screen than a Roku device in an adult’s bedroom, and so on.
This fix is important because Roku is the video streaming gateway for more than 100 million households, so any tweak to the UI could have a big impact.
A more prominent ad placement could help boost revenue, though Roku executives were careful to note that they didn’t want that to detract from the overall experience.
“We’re an entertainment platform and we’re in the advertising business, so it’s really important for us to take that kind of consumer emotion and consumer point of view, but also get the advertising part of it right and make it feel natural,” said Frances Callahan, head of ad product marketing.
“When we set out to rethink the home screen, we knew we had to listen to the people who use it every day. So we talked to viewers, tested it extensively, and pushed until the design and data aligned for a meaningful update,” said Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood. “Now, our new home screen puts entertainment at the center of everything, while staying true to Roku’s simple, intuitive roots. More than 100 million households will feel the difference as soon as they turn on their TV — and that unlocks a better, more powerful experience for our partners, too.”
