Hulu relaunched its website with a bold new look Tuesday night that replaces the traditional show grid with much larger artwork and a focus on personalization as well as popular shows and episodes. The new design will be rolled out to Hulu’s entire user base over the next few days, but can already be previewed at New.Hulu.com.
Hulu’s VP of Product Rob Wong announced the relaunch with a blog post, in which he explained that a key motivation for the new design was the desire to do a better job at surfacing relevant content:
“We’ve started by using larger, more vivid artwork to feature last night’s TV episodes and new additions to Hulu. We’ve also implemented a new tray-style format to make it easy for you to browse and discover content. And for logged-in users, we highlight the “Shows You Watch” to make it super easy to jump directly to the shows you are already enjoying on Hulu.”
Another key feature worth highlighting is the redesigned movie library. Movies have long been the forgotten stepchild of Hulu, but the new movie pages feature bigger cover art as well as infinite scrolling. It almost looks like that other subscription service…
Speaking of other services: Hulu’s new design definitely makes it look like a completely different site. Before, there was a bit of information overload on many pages, with long lists of episodes that looked more like math homework than a fun TV experience. The new layout does away with all of that, and basically replaces it with artwork, which is much more intuitive.
Hulu had relaunched its video player earlier this year. I guess this means that the service’s apps are next?
