Tentpole Series

With the reimagining of what the Crunchyroll brand means as a whole, outside of ad placements, Crunchyroll's ability to deliver more than just video wasn't strong. The company wanted to promote their most watched series, as well as get fans hyped for hotly anticipated shows.

The company has been focused on delivering an all-in-on experience for our fans. Not just through video, but also games, merchandise, manga, events, and more. It is the idea that we can deliver experiences beyond video which engage our fans more with the Crunchyroll brand. This 360-degree experience is all key aspects of what differentiates us from other SVOD competitors.

When it came time to think about how we wanted to approach tentpole series designs, we wanted to integrate games, merchandise, news, related anime series, and more inside the Crunchyroll web experience. By doing so, we're able to hype up a brand new anime show that we know is going to do well, and show our licensors in Japan that if they want their anime to do well overseas, then Crunchyroll is the place to do just that.

While my main focus at Crunchyroll is to help designers with prototypes, I also became heavily involved in the ever-expanding 360-degree content experience. One important feature that I was tasked with working on was creating a brand new series page for what we call our tentpole shows. These shows are either our most popular anime series on Crunchyroll, or we are planning to push heavily with marketing and on social platforms.

Below you'll find a rough outline of the process that I've used when working on tentpole pages.

Business goals - more foot traffic on our most important anime IPs.

Audience needs - create a place where super fans can geek out and digest everything related to that particular anime IP.

Jira tickets have been written up, and put into my design sprints. I understand the goals in mind, and so now I'll work on user flows and wireframes. I'm just trying to explore and figure out solutions to how we can engage our users, and make tentpole pages feel more cohesive.

At this point, designs are considered "design done," and they've been uploaded to Zeplin for engineers to review. We'll either meet daily, or every other day to discuss the progress of tickets associated with tentpole designs, and if needed, we will go back at anytime to any of the previous stages to re-assess business requirements/ needs.

With the ongoing nature of this project, here are a few key ideas that have been considered must haves for tentpole pages.

There are so many other sections that could be added to tentpole pages. Such as integrating browser games related to that show, or live streams where folks can watch the premiere of a new tentpole series. These are all ideas that have been talked about, and may show up in future iterations.

Below you'll find some designs for what tentpole pages may look like.