Roku is Revamping Its Homescreen For the First Time in Over a Decade

Roku's new homescreen Roku

For the first time in more than a decade, Roku is overhauling its homescreen in a bid to drive more engagement and surface relevant content and apps for its users, with more dynamic and personalized functionality.

“The new homescreen will lean into personalization, while making sure that it retains the simplicity that it has been known for,” said Roku VP of viewer product Preston Smalley, speaking in a press briefing in New York Wednesday morning. “We sat down with our founder, Anthony Wood, our CEO, and really talked about what does this mean for the company? What does it mean for him?

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“We haven’t changed it for a decade, so we set those out, and we were really clear about that,” he continued. “And then we assembled the broad team, design, analytics, engineering, brand ads, the AI people, and so we brought them all together and said, ‘look, this is what we’re trying to achieve, and we let the data be our guide, we did the research, we tried different things, we brainstormed, we went through discovery, and where we ended up was not necessarily where we started, but it was always guided by those same principles and values that we set out at the very beginning.”

The big changes: Your most used apps will now be featured more prominently, reducing the need to hunt for specific streaming services. There will also be a “top picks for you” section that recommends apps and programming that Roku thinks you will enjoy, and a large “marquee” ad spot that could tout apps or shows.

There will also be genre-based destinations based on your usage habits, and around your subscriptions.

Roku City will also get its own tile for quick access to the screensaver, which will now get an interactive overhaul. And Roku will launch a curated “your daily scoop” featuring shows and cultural trends.

There will also be changes to the bread and butter functionality like search, menus and shortcuts.

“Simplicity is and has always been our north star at Roku, and this wasn’t about reinventing Roku –although we did look at some wild ideas at the beginning to consider — but really we wanted to keep the specialness of the platform, and so it became more about refinement,” said Margret Schmidt, VP of User Experience Design & Research for Roku. “How do we naturally evolve it? How do we make it smarter and more helpful more content focused and helpful in that way, without it feeling more complicated.”

The new homescreen platform will also be able to adapt to how households use Rokus. “This is one of the last remaining shared devices, the TV in the home, and we know that there’s multiple people living in homes,” Smalley says.

So a Roku used in a kids playroom may have a different homescreen than a Roku in an adult’s bedroom, and so on.

The overhaul matters because Roku is the gateway to streaming video for more than 100 million households, so any tweak to the user interface could have a significant impact.

And the more prominent ad placement could help drive revenue, though Roku executives were careful to note that they don’t want it to detract from the overall experience.

“We are both an entertainment platform and we are an ads business, so for us it’s really important to take that kind of consumer sentiment and the consumer point of view, but also get the ads portion of it right and have it feel natural,” said Frances Callaghan, head of ad product commercialization.

“When we set out to rethink the Home Screen, we knew we should listen to the people who use it every day. So we talked to the viewers, we tested extensively, and we pushed until the design and the data lined up for a meaningful update,” said Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood. “Now, our new Home Screen puts entertainment at the center of everything, while staying true to Roku’s simple, intuitive roots. More than 100 million households will feel the difference the moment they turn on their TV—and it opens up a better, more powerful experience for our partners as well.”