Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the fifty-fifth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – where we explore innovation and how design sparks real change in large organisations and agencies.
Entertainment and design have always worked hand in hand, particularly through the mediums of entertainment and filmmaking. Today, we benefit from features such as layers in Photoshop, as well as key lines and keyframes in all motion graphic software. The entertainment industry continues to elevate the design profession.
For more than 50 years, a select group of designers have moved between marketing, branding, and entertainment, not to mention broadcasting, to design experiences that are consumed on TV, computers, tablets, or mobile devices.
With this in mind, new patterns, behaviours, and expectations have emerged as a reflection of customers' need to navigate increasingly complex user interfaces. Users categorise, select, and filter the extensive data produced by the entertainment industry.
The number of films available on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Apple TV, and even basic Indian TV is staggering. Millions of titles span hundreds of categories with various recommendation algorithms, and the presence of over 10 million actors presents an architectural and branding challenge that very few designers can navigate successfully.
Creating something that is highly appealing to the eye and utilises the space of the communication medium, while remaining fully functional and customisable for 12 different languages—none of which is based on the Latin alphabet—has been a challenge of scale.
Architecturally, the content model has driven a content strategy that informs the structural layout of each page, allowing the team to understand, render, and correctly display all attributes and functionalities within the TV interface. In this way, the design team has always considered these three lenses when creating, recreating, or adjusting an existing UI, enabling them to either enhance or deprecate functionalities essential within the viewport.
Shifting the mindset from simply exploring, finding, consuming, or interacting has enabled all designers to remain aligned, regardless of their location. By creating and utilising a unified design system across the entire TV proposition, we have reached a point where more than 20 designers based in Europe and 10 in India are capable of constantly improving the viewer experience.
One of the most unique aspects of this entire proposition was not the complexity itself, but the agility of the team to quickly adopt, test, and learn from existing code. By improving functions, selecting the appropriate form, and then designing based on clearly defined requirements, we established a rapid feedback loop. This allowed us to transform one of the largest providers of broadcasting and entertainment in India from a traditional TV proposition into a fully modern, integrated service—not only available on TV, but also accessible via desktop, tablet, mobile, and now even smartwatches—giving users full control of their entertainment experience with the latest hardware and software.
It is worth mentioning that this 20-person team delivered a unified broadcast experience for almost one billion viewers during the TATA Cricket World Championship.
For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.
