Streaming TV Product Design

Helping millions of viewers enjoy their free streaming TV

In my time as a senior product designer for Paramount's Pluto TV, I worked on essential improvements to content search and discovery for all platform versions, helped implement a kids' mode feature for nontraditional TV platforms, and designed custom interactions for LG TVs' remote pointer system. Oh, and I also worked on one of their first virtual reality proof of concepts.

Adding Kid's Mode To Nontraditional OS Versions

The company was adding a systemwide Kid's Mode feature, and it was my responsibility to make adaptions and adjustments for implementing the new UX and UI elements to versions of the app for nontraditional platforms and OSs: LG TVs, Samsung, Playstation, Xbox, etc.

There were some major differences in capabilities to work around, so I spent a lot of time reconciling those constraints across different platforms to produce a unified experience for that category of app versions...in addition to adapting graphics and layouts for each platform instance.

A few of my key screens and ux artifacts from the unified design

Improving Content Search And Discovery

When I joined the company, content search and discovery features for major platforms were lagging behind competitors and needed an upgrade. I was the lead designer for this initiative and put together the competitive analysis, feature audit, and final designs needed for getting Pluto near or on par with other streaming services.

I designed implementations of real-time search results display, selectable keyword suggestions, algorithm adjustments to improve results relevancy, and alternate keyboards for different Android TV devices.

The work covered app versions for tvOS, iOS, Android TV, Android, web, and nontraditional TV operating systems.

Some key screens for search across different operating systems

Artifacts from the design package I created for PI planning

VR Proof Of Concept Design And Prototyping

I joined the emerging experiences team to work on a proof of concept project for a VR version of the streaming service. After establishing project direction in a series of workshops that I helped facilitate, I started testing interaction and UI schemes and also experimented with a few elements of video playback (mainly how to generate light emission from video playback to achieve the screen glow you would experience in a dark theater). Also, we decided to use Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit to speed the prototyping process up a bit.

In a later round of prototyping, I went a little deeper into different flows and rough ideas of how to display UIs for discovery, browsing, and selection of TV content.
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The proof of concept demo we delivered merged the interaction design work I provided with a completed version of content delivery service for video playback and 2D UI content.

Content Discovery, Browsing, And Selection Prototyping

Proof Of Concept Demo Video