Large Scale Survey of Emerging Payment Options

HBO Max (Warner Bros Discovery)

Survey I Payments Research I Impact: Roadmap

The payments team already had access to global industry research about where the payment ecosystem was heading. However, leadership needed insights that were specific to the HBO Max user base, particularly among younger generations, to evaluate whether alternative payment methods could improve , retention, and user satisfaction. The open question was: which new options would matter most for our subscribers, and in what order should they be prioritized?

My Contribution

As UX Researcher at HBO Max (Warner Bros. Discovery), I designed and led a large-scale survey (n = 1,000) to understand user awareness, trust, and intent to adopt emerging payment options ins the US, evaluating emerging payment methods such as: Pay by Bank, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), Digital Wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and PayPal.

While the team already had access to broad global research about payment trends, I identified insights that were specific to our own subscriber base and partnered closely with product managers and payments stakeholders to scope the right questions, ensure the survey captured generational differences, and deliver findings that could directly shape roadmap decisions.

Methodology

Sample: 1,000 current and prospective HBO Max subscribers across demographics
Survey content:
• Awareness and familiarity with each payment type
• Trust and security perceptions
• Likelihood of adoption compared to card payments
• Trade-offs around convenience, fees, and protections
Analysis: quantified intent levels, compared across payment types, and tied recommendations directly to roadmap feasibility

Key Findings

The survey confirmed that HBO Max subscribers, largely follow US payment trends seen across industry reporting, giving confidence these white papers can inform global roll outs and decisions around payments methods. These trends include:

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Pay by Bank: Very low awareness; high hesitation due to security and refund concerns.

Digital Wallets (Apple Pay / Google Pay): Strong appeal, with high intent to use when available; perceived as fast, secure, and convenient.

PayPal: Familiar and trusted, but not seen as adding major convenience over cards.

BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later): Moderate awareness, but limited appeal for subscription services.

Impact

The findings gave the team confidence to move beyond a card-only checkout experience and to make the case to executive leadership to incorporate these payments methods into the experience. Apple Pay and Google Pay quickly rose to the top of the roadmap, enabling faster, more seamless transactions that improved both user satisfaction and conversion rates.

I also helped product leadership contextualize the long-term potential of Pay by Bank, showing that adoption would follow once user familiarity with newer payment methods increased.

Finally, I tied our findings to GlobalPay’s broader market research, confirming that our U.S. user patterns aligned with overall streaming and entertainment payment trends. This validation gave leadership confidence to use external market data in future decision-making, and, as the first collaboration between Payments and UXR, established a repeatable research process for the team moving forward.

Reflection

This project reinforced how powerful large-scale quantitative research can be in shaping strategic decisions. By surveying U.S. users across devices and payment preferences, we uncovered clear patterns, like lower trust in newer methods such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) and stronger confidence in familiar options like Apple Pay and credit cards, that had previously gone unquantified.

Key takeaways for me:

The importance of cross-functional alignment: Partnering early with Product for this research ensured findings were framed in both user and business terms and could support the team during roadmapping.
The need to pair quant with qual: The survey surfaced what users preferred, with open-ended questions helping us understand why some options inspired more trust than others.

In hindsight, I’d invest more time in refining segmentation and weighting early on, to ensure results could be sliced even more precisely by user behavior and device type. Overall, this experience reaffirmed that payment flows aren’t just transactional, they’re moments of trust that directly influence conversion, retention, and the overall perception of the brand.