NOW TV

NOW TV (Sky) · 2013 · Media & Telecoms · via BSkyB

A ground-up redesign of NOW TV, Sky’s streaming service, a new visual language and a design system delivered across nine platforms.

Introduction

I joined NOW TV (Sky’s streaming service) in 2013, originally to design its new entertainment package (top shows like The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire, alongside the existing films and sport). But the deeper problem was the platform itself: a dated, shallow site that people found genuinely hard to navigate, with the reviews to match. A small team of three formed to fix it (me on design, a colleague on UX and a developer) with a bigger ambition than the brief we’d been handed.

Rebuild NOW TV to compete in a market that was moving fast: Netflix rising, Amazon arriving, Channel 4 and Film4 setting the bar. The goal was a modern, future-proofed visual language and structure strong enough to scale across every device the service ran on.

Challenges overcome

Two kinds of hard. First the product: three packages (films, sport and entertainment) that customers could own in any combination, down to a day pass for sport, so no single layout worked for everyone, on top of a vast catalogue that had to feel competitive. Then the politics: the redesign was design-led, but senior leadership didn’t see a problem with the existing site, so the work had to both challenge the status quo and win over the people resisting it. The turning point was a user test (our unfinished product pitched against the finished likes of iPlayer, Amazon, Netflix and Channel 4) where users still rated ours the best in the room. That unlocked the go-ahead, and the rollout across every platform (iPad, PlayStation, Xbox and more).

Strategic thinking & planning

Hundreds of iterations shaped a new visual language and a filter-led way through the catalogue: pick a genre or rating on the left, watch the results resolve on the right. I pushed hard for auto-playing video heroes (land on the site and a trailer starts), something nobody in the market was doing yet; I sourced the trailer team’s API to prove it in a working prototype. (Netflix made it the norm not long after.) Once the direction was set, I sat in with the developers and, before tools like zeroheight existed, we designed and built our own in-house React component library so any designer could pull ready-made components. The design got stronger through their pushback (more buildable, more reusable) and I documented the full design system and style guide before handing it over.

Outcomes

A new visual language and an in-house design system that rolled out across NOW TV’s platforms and set the team up for faster, more consistent development, much of it still visible in the product today. Some of it was simply ahead of its time: the auto-playing video heroes I prototyped became an industry standard soon after. Thirteen years on, it’s work I’m still proud of.