Prime Video’s updated user interface officially rolled out globally this week after the Amazon-owned streamer offered a first look in July. The new changes, which were prompted by customer feedback, were designed to help the company’s customers discover the content they want to watch faster and mark Prime Video’s first major UI overhaul.
“What we found over the last couple of years is that we have so much available to our customers, and that discovery and being able to manage that experience in a contained way in a hub destination has become increasingly challenging,” vice president of design at Prime Video Kam Keshmiri told TheWrap.
“Customers continually tell us that they really want to understand what is included in their Prime subscription. So we started thinking about how to elevate the Prime destination itself, which we have in a tab now, and as you start to pull the thread on all of these customer opportunities to improve, it started to coalesce [into] this set of changes we were motivated to make,” he added.
Prime Video’s new user interface
Among the notable changes are a new navigation bar that includes specific destinations such as “Home,” “Movies,” “TV Shows,” “Sports” and “Live TV.” The separate sections makes finding the latest home premiere film or blockbuster hit easier within the platform.
“I see this as a journey to be the movies destination for the internet, where we want people to find the movies they love, be able to get early access to the greatest movies in the cinema, and also have those customized, personalized movies that meet their needs and their interests,” Keshmiri said.
The update also allows viewers to see their active add-on subscriptions — such as Paramount+, Max and AMC+ — in a more unified space, allowing customers to focus on having a “great emotional experience with content they love” without having to do mental gymnastics to find it, he added.
There’s also a new Prime section, which helps customers find titles included in their subscription versus movies and TV shows available to rent or buy, or pay per view events.
“The way we do that is both, subtle cues like a little blue checkmark and included with prime or a partner subscription, but also having more immediacy with play buttons,” Keshmiri said. “If you’re in the [home page] and there’s something you can watch straight away, we have a one-click play. In the past that wasn’t as immediate, so getting customers to their entitled content felt a little bit more frictionful than it needed to.”
Customers can purchase rentals through a shopping bag icon, with an updated payment process that offers more transparency with upfront pricing.
Prime Video’s new interface also incorporates generative artificial intelligence to help make better content recommendations.
“It’s really important for customers to focus on what they’re in the mood for and what they want to find. So this idea of starting to bring more personalized, curated experiences into the carousels, things that are made for you and that key off of your interests and what you’ve told us through your previous viewing of things you’re excited about, that was something we really wanted to collapse,” Keshmiri said. “In the past, that felt like it was an inhibiting factor in our app and now we’re bringing these unified carousels of curated experiences together. Generative AI is a suite of technologies that allows us to do that in a much more personal and unique way.”
The search bar function is also more easily accessible, with users able to access it within two clicks from anywhere within the experience, and the quality of the artwork within the app has been improved to help “communicate the power of the story you’re about to enjoy.”
“All of those things together culminated in this relatively large improvement that we were able to start shipping,” he said.
While it’s still early days, Keshmiri teased that Prime Video is continuing to evolve the platform based on ongoing feedback, though he declined to reveal what other product updates are in the works next.
“We’re really excited about the rapid evolution of our product, but we also really appreciate that in the end, we deal in creativity and emotion and getting people to things that they fall in love with, get excited about, they cry to, and they jump around watching. So for me, success is actually enabling customers to get to the emotional resonance they want to get to quickly,” he added. “We’ve really worked on the underlying technology to make the whole experience feel more fluid, more performant, much less friction filled …. So I feel that those things make the experience a little bit better for customers. I think that’s how we get out of the way and help you have the experience you want to have.”
