HBO’s revamped Max navigation comes with a handy new option

Streamers love to fiddle with their navigation menus, moving this menu bar here and shifting this button there, all in the name of “streamlining” the experience. The changes are typically just different, not better, but Max’s latest menu revamp at least adds something new. 

The most obvious change on the new Max navigation is that the top menu bar, which housed such items as Home, Series, Movies, HBO, B-R Sports, and News, has been nixed. 

Those top “content lenses” have now shifted over to the left-side menu, meaning you’ll no longer have to jump from one side of the screen to the other when navigating the various menu items. 

Sounds logical—although as The Streamable points out, the Max change is essentially the reverse of what Netflix did last year, when it moved its main navigation bar from the left side of the page to the top. (Sigh.) 

Aside from juggling the location of its existing menu items, the new Max navigation adds a couple of new options to the mix: Categories and What’s New. 

Categories is just what it sounds like, with a Max press release saying the option offers “a new pathway for users to browse titles by genre, brand, and thematic collections.” That’s a pretty standard navigational feature—Netflix and most of the other big streamers let you browse by category too, in one configuration or another—but we’ll take it. 

More interesting is the What’s New option, a “new navigation page showcasing content that has recently arrived on the platform, as well as those coming or leaving soon.” 

What’s New should be a handy way to keep tabs on recently added movies and shows on Max—and more importantly, to catch titles that are poised to leave the service before they’re gone. 

Veteran Max users on Reddit are saying that the just-added What’s New option hearkens back to the “leaving soon” section on the former HBO Max app, back before Max underwent its name change.  

Max says it’s been testing its new navigation layout in Latin America, and that the revamped design will go worldwide in a “phased rollout approach.”