I, like nearly 20 million people, love the Game of Thrones TV series. But I don't watch it on live TV. In fact, I'm late to the Game and just started watching from season one a few months ago. I subscribed to the HBO Now online streaming service when it became available — primarily to watch Game of Thrones — HBO's main attraction. We've all had the experience of a show like Game of Thrones coming up in conversation. Someone in the group twitches and asks what season everyone is on before they decide to leave the room, covering their ears and saying “lalalalala” as they walk away.

Much to my dismay though, each time I click on the Game of Thrones thumbnail, it reveals a big image of the latest episode — complete with characters that I didn't know were still alive, in contexts that give away the plot. I see who is together arm in arm, which villains are undeservedly still in power, and which heroes are alive and in jail.

I literally have to block the screen with my hands each time I go to watch an episode. A friend of mine uses the squint approach: half looking away in order to blur the revealing images and summary text, while he maneuvers the mouse to the correct season.

Covering the HBONow interface with hands
For people who binge-watch Game of Thrones, HBO Now is dark and full of spoilers. I use my hands to block the image and episode summary, in order to avoid spoiling the next episode. The only elements that are safe to look at are the season numbers.

And the only way to access past seasons is by clicking a small, single-digit season number directly above the spoiler image. Or, once in the right season, you scroll down past the image and navigate through a filmstrip to get to the right episode.

First, Do No Harm

In the fields of UX and design, we often aim to create experiences that delight users. We spend hours debating the fine points of user reactions and emotions. Should we add full-width images to create this or that feeling? If we animate this text as users scroll, will they feel more delighted? Often, these are points so fine, that in user testing, people usually don't notice them, let alone have a marked emotional reaction to them.

I can't think of another instance on the entire internet where people are physically blocking parts of the screen with their hands because surfaced content ruins their experience. And in such a charged context. Most tasks we deal with aren't tasks of passion. Choosing car insurance, selecting a color for a sweater, applying coupons. These aren't things people really look forward to during the day. But in this case, if even a small portion of users can relate to the negative, visceral aversion to spoilers, something must be amiss.

So I wondered, what's happening here? What decision process led to this design?

Multiple Audiences, Different Task Scenarios

What's at play is multiple audiences with differing task scenarios, all sharing one interface design.

There are the people who watch every week, or stay mostly up-to-date: they want to know what’s new. And there is the quickly growing segment of people who binge-watch or start a show months or years after it originally aired. We don’t want to have our experience of past seasons ruined by being told what’s happening “now” in the show universe.

'Good Enough for Both'

Designers should attempt to find designs and interfaces that are good for all its major audience groups. If you're a bank with both consumer and business account holders accessing the same site, you design for multiple sets of tasks. A university website may speak mostly to prospective students, but it doesn’t include images or language that might turn off potential donors.

When a company is focused on one set of users, and design decisions are made solely with that group in mind, the design can lose touch with other audiences who also matter.

HBO's legacy is in live TV, so, most likely, viewers watching live are its primary design persona. For those users who watch HBO shows as they come out, showing a few details about the latest episode isn’t so traumatic, because most of those people are pretty much caught up on the show.

In contrast, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu and iTunes have a legacy in on-demand watching, so that is their primary design persona — and their interface decisions plainly take that set of user needs into account. Those sites don’t assume that people have been watching the show all along, so they default to listing episodes from the beginning, where there is no risk of revealing the plot.

Netflix and Amazon Prime
Amazon Prime opens a show to the first episode of the first season. Netflix expands a show to an overview section, with a Play button to start the first episode. When users have already watched at least 1 episode of a show, both Amazon Prime and Netflix open to the next unwatched episode.

(Note that none of the latter interfaces harm the experience of people who follow a show every week.)

Personas and 'Lowest Common Denominators'

We've all heard the argument that you can't be everything to everyone. That only core user tasks deserve a place in the already cluttered menu. That in designing for everyone, you design for no one.

And that can absolutely be true. But, there are also many cases where satisfying multiple personas and sets of user needs doesn’t hurt the experience of either group. The interface doesn’t have to meet each groups needs perfectly, but it should at least meet the essential needs.

For HBO's presumed target audience of people who follow shows each week, there is no real harm in presenting a give-away image and summary of the latest episode when first clicking the Game of Thrones icon on HBO Now. But it does harm the experience of the late-comers.

The lesson is to regularly reassess the user personas and needs and to keep questioning if their needs might have changed. Over years of UX research, we have observed many shifts in behavior that mandate alterations to a design. Use cases for the same website change. The same individual may have a distinctly different set of needs on the mobile website than on the desktop or on the smartwatch. In e-commerce, different types of online shoppers all have developed different priorities.

The same user is now multiple personas and use cases in different contexts. And that needs to be considered and reassessed. Even though every organization is somewhat of an oil tanker — with legacy systems that go deep and are slow to change, it’s always important to keep an eye on how users might be changing, and how to satisfy emerging use cases.

Deciding What to Feature

When audiences want different things from the same content, designers and product teams must do the work of determining what to feature.

1. Figure out what your users want.

You do this with multiple research methods, including field studies and user interviews. Listen for how your main audiences think about your product, how they make decisions, when and why they prefer things a certain way. You’ll get a sense of your main user groups’ mental models.

From there, you can start to generate personas and scenarios for each user type. (Learn more about leveraging personas to craft user-centered design experiences in our full day course on personas.)

Netflix famously hired a cultural anthropologist to go into people’s living rooms and observe how they watched TV. Those qualitative observations, in combination with analytics, gave them enormous insights into binge-watching, and they adjusted their interaction design to suit their audiences.

2. Assess which groups’ behavior are most valuable for the business.

Just because we strive for user-centered design doesn’t mean we ignore the business needs. We must acknowledge what’s important for our business goals, too. That means finding some answers: Which groups have the highest value conversions? Why do those groups choose this company over another? What are the features about this product or service that make it a “must-have” for people? Content strategy is all about prioritizing and managing content that satisfies the user needs and the business needs.

3. Make informed design decisions based on the groups that bring the most value, and design to those preferences.

Once you know the different user goals and tasks, and you know which groups are most important for the success of the business, the design work can begin. Of course, designers should still strive to accommodate, as much as possible, the experience for those user groups that bring less value to the company.

In the case of HBO Now, simply defaulting to the next unwatched episode would be an easy way to accommodate even the lesser-priority user groups, the spoiler-fearing binge-watchers. (They can do this because it’s a subscription service that knows what each paying customer has been watching.)

4. Do it again.

When you’re done with all this, you’re not done anyway. All user interface design should be iterative design, because the UX world is too complex for anybody to create a 100% perfect design, no matter how hard they work. Thus, your new release should simply be the starting point for your next release. That’s always true, and usually these subsequent design rounds can leverage insights from your original user research. But as shown in the example of HBO Now and binge-watching of multiple-season shows, new user needs or behaviors will arise from time to time, so you also need to return to visiting Square One from time to time and do big-picture user research that doesn’t presume anything but starts from first principles to see what’s up with your users.

Conclusion

Satisfying multiple sets of user needs doesn't mean designing for the lowest common denominator. It's about empathy with the different use cases and making sure that the content for one audience, even if it’s a main audience, doesn’t ruin the experience for a different use case.