HBO Max

Spotlight Pages

A discovery search to drive users to “Spotlight Pages” that provide users with specially curated content

Video of user selecting the Harry Potter Collections Spotlight Page and browsing the content offerings.

Role

Software Engineering Intern

Team

Content Discovery Search Team

Mentor

Hao Wang

Skills

Fullstack development

Data ingestion

Tools

Javascript

Timeline

Spring 2022

Connecting fans to fandoms

Have you ever finished a book or film and felt that empty feeling of leaving an immersive fictional world? What are you supposed to do next? The Content Discover Search team sought to fill this film-shaped void by developing Spotlight Pages to connect users to adjacent content related to the same story, character, genre, or theme.

Technical Considerations

  • Limited information in an asset — how to transform and populate missing fields

  • Hierarchy of results — how to display the spotlight page at the top of the search results without affecting other results

  • Scalability — how to utilize the current fetching and indexing logic

business objectives

  • Promote specific Spotlights that represent HBO Max and user interests

  • Increase the visibility of marketing campaigns targeted to specific audiences and fans

  • Signal to viewers where HBO Max has the full set of content

User Objectives

When a user types in a partial, fuzzy, or exact match, the Spotlight Page displays as the top search result.

The problem

Users are not able to discover or search for related content that pertain to the same story, character, genre, or theme.

Imagine that Hermione just finished reading the Harry Potter series and wants to watch the movies to continue connecting with the story…

  • She logs into HBO Max and types in “Harry Potter.”

  • She sees that the first result is the Harry Potter collection and clicks onto the tile.

  • She’s taken to the Spotlight Page, where she browses through all the Harry Potter movies and related stories.

  • Once she finishes watching the series, she returns to the Spotlight Page and views curated and related recommendations to find her next world—maybe it’s time for her to check out Middle Earth in The Hobbit?!

Proposed Architecture

build an adapter to augment data

Proposed architecture of the fetching and indexing logic to utilize pre-existing formatters.

Demo

Partial, fuzzy, & Synonym Search

Video of user typing in “Hogwarts” and then variations of “Harry,” such as “Hrry” and “Harryy,” to get to the Spotlight Page.