Nobody Looks at Your Hero Section
Inside media organizations, one of the most contested browse surfaces on a homepage or streaming app is the “hero” section. That’s the big image banner at the top of a page. I mean, it’s called the “hero” — that sounds like premium real estate!
It sorta makes sense that the hero has so much promotional competition because hero sections on more traditional marketing sites — like a SaaS landing page or an eCommerce product page — are often the highest-leverage conversion area on the page. It also makes intuitive sense to prioritize the hero banner… it’s the first thing you see. Right?
Actually, in a video browse context, the hero is the last thing people see.
In a UK eye-tracking study on people browsing connected TV screens, the hero section took the longest time to gain a glance from participants. People looked at all of the content below it first. Even though it’s at the top of the screen and it’s bigger than everything else, the hero literally ranked dead last. And when people did look at it, they dwelled on it for very little time.
Why don’t people look at the hero?
In interviews with the participants in the study, most of them thought the hero was advertising. It wasn’t advertising. Because of their previous habits and interactions with similar modules, they simply assumed it was advertising, and skipped past it. Or as one subject perfectly expressed it:
“I do see it, but it just goes through my head. It has no impact on me.”
Hilarious!
They also expressed general confusion about the hero. A few general themes of confusion: 1) it’s rotating through multiple types of content 2) it’s hard to know whether they have access to the content 3) it’s “distracting” and 4) it does not appear relevant to them.
Merchandising and live programming traps
The obvious implication of this is to be a little more skeptical of the impact of hero spaces. Reduce their size. Reduce their internal emphasis and how much they try to do. Consider removing them entirely.
More than that, the fact that hero spaces are assumed to be “impersonal” and “advertising” — even when they aren’t — has bigger implications for trust. Viewers have a preconceived bias you’re fighting against with anything that’s hero-like. I see a few streaming platforms starting to design everything to look a little more like a hero in the name of bigger/better merchandising. It looks really cool but this research makes me wonder if that’s the wrong direction.
And as for live programming, there are particular implications here. Live content is hard to merchandise because it is momentary. In the name of urgently grabbing attention, platforms often leap to a hero banner before, during and after an event. This further compounds the content-availability confusion viewers also expressed. And if viewers are trained to ignore hero sections, the highest-priority content might be sitting in the lowest-trust spot.
