STARZ

Lead Product Designer

The STARZ (domestic) and LIONSGATE+ (international) streaming product needed to visually rebrand. As design, product, brand and streaming service trends continue to evolve, the STARZ brand was no longer projecting a visually modernized experience that could compete with the times.

Additionally, many of STARZ’ core brand attributes shared too many visual references to its competitors. For example, research suggested that STARZ primary color set — red, black and white — created too close of a reference to a certain, very popular streaming competitor. Therefore, it was time to consider how STARZ and LIONSGATE+ can create a brand that differentiates itself from anything else in the marketplace, continues to attract its core demographic and even excites users who may be less familiar with STARZ and LIONSGATE+.

Additionally, from a product perspective, we needed to place value on how we could create a rebrand within a design system that allows for variety and flexibility as we continue to grow and evolve but also create a structure and discipline that helps visually give the user a reliable experience across all of our streaming platforms.

The time, energy and effort put behind rebrand research for this initiative was extensive. Product Design and Research collaborated for nearly a year on testing, designing, and iterating every element of the STARZ and LIONSGATE+ product UI. Research and testing included, but was not limited to, logos, colors, typography, buttons, backgrounds, increment spacing, and segmented controls.

All this to say, no stone was left unturned.

While research was vast, comprehensive, and largely confidential, breaking down the top-line research that went into landing on a call-to-action brand color was fascinating.

Every rebrand needs to give serious consideration when introducing new brand colors. What colors do users like? What is most effective? We started our research by presenting users with a vast amount of colors across four platforms and had participants complete randomized tasks where they would select a call-to-action button some place on the page.

Performance Results By Click:

At the end of the study we surveyed the participants and asked them questions about visibility, readability and preference of color. For example, in this small sample of a larger color study:

• Yellow performed better than or at the same rate as red color in all situations.
• Blue/teal performed the worst often blending into studio artwork or not providing a visible amount of contrast to draw the eye.
• When asked, participants consider yellow as a call-to-action to be most viable (60%), readable (55%), and the most preferable (42.5%) of the three colored buttons presented above.

Once we determined that yellow was a highly effective color within our apps, we needed to determine what shade of yellow was considered best performing and most pleasing among our users. After a number of color tests, we settled on three colors—which we called Glint A, Glint B, and Glint C (see in bar graph below).

In a series of follow-up studies we looked at the various performance metrics among participants when confronted with Glint A, Glint B and Glint C. These studies revealed that Glint B was the overwhelming winner.

In a preference survey targeted towards streaming within our marketing demographics, Glint B was also the winner overall. Notably, Glint B was also the winner among women, all racial and ethnic groups and participants ages 35-54.

Sample of Color Preference by Demographics: (users self-identified)

And with this, a primary brand color was born. We moved forward with the plan to implement this color within our design system and continued to design, test and iterate among other UI factors until the perfect STARZ and LIONSGATE brand system came to life.

Once we had research to provide insight on nearly every element of our product rebrand, we then had to consider how to resourcefully bring all of this insight into our design system. If there is one word to describe the STARZ and LIONSGATE+ design system, that word would be robust. Since STARZ lives on  multiple streaming platforms, all with different use cases and needs, the organization divides its design system by platform. That means we have a separate yet cohesive design system for TV, mobile and web. The challenge before us was to integrate our research findings holistically across our different platforms but also give consideration for every platform and operating system’s unique requirements.

Through continued testing, iterating, presenting and running the team through democratic design exercises over the course of six to nine months, we refined our design system to a place that worked well for Product, UX, Engineers, and, our end users alike.

Elevating our product in this rebrand included the design or redesign of 95 icons, 80 typography variants, a new in-app notifications system and a more disciplined and defined use case logic surrounding the use of colors, buttons, inputs, and segmented controls across our TV, mobile and web streaming platforms.

While the system is extensive and ever-evolving, below is a sample of part of our iOS mobile design system.

Working with our AppleTV, Google TV, Fire TV, WebTV, iOS mobile, Android mobile, and web engineering teams, it was time to put our research and design system efforts to work across our STARZ and LIONSGATE+ platforms. What resulted was an edgy yet approachable, modernized yet contemporary, and disciplined yet spirited  international streaming product implemented across 37 countries worldwide.