Sky Entertainment Platform

Sky's Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) hadn't seen a fundamental rethink in years. Despite Sky's enormous content library — over 500 channels, thousands of on-demand titles, and new streaming integrations — the interface was still built around a rigid time-based grid that made discovery feel like searching a spreadsheet.

Internal usability research revealed that 63% of users felt overwhelmed when browsing channels, and average time-to-play had increased by 40% over three years. Younger subscribers, accustomed to Netflix and Disney+'s recommendation-led surfaces, were disengaging at alarming rates.

The challenge wasn't just visual polish. It was rethinking how 11 million people — ranging from elderly viewers in rural UK to tech-savvy families streaming across five devices — find what they want to watch.

We kicked off with a three-week discovery sprint. I collaborated with the UX Research team to synthesise existing data and conduct new contextual research — visiting viewers in their homes across London, Manchester and Glasgow to observe natural TV watching behaviour.

We mapped three distinct user archetypes: the Lean-Back Viewer (passive, channel-surfing), the Intent-Driven Watcher (knows exactly what they want), and the Social Viewer (watching with family, negotiating what's on). Each had radically different needs from the same interface.

Competitive analysis covered Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime. We found a clear gap: Sky's content breadth was unmatched, but the surface for surfacing it was lagging. The opportunity was to combine the familiarity of live TV with the intelligence of streaming platforms.

Designing for a television is fundamentally different from designing for a screen you hold in your hand. The 10-foot experience demands different type scales, interaction patterns, and visual hierarchy. We ran daily design critiques with engineering, weekly playback sessions with the product team, and bi-weekly user testing with a panel of Sky subscribers.

I owned the visual design language — defining the new type system (Sky Text, a proprietary font), the colour hierarchy (with live TV in warm amber, on-demand in deep navy, and streaming integrations colour-coded), and the spatial grid that worked across TV resolutions from HD to 8K.

We prototyped at full fidelity in Figma, then moved to Apple TV and Android TV test builds for real-environment testing. What looks great on a laptop often falls apart on a 65-inch screen from three metres away. Many of our early type sizes were far too small. Motion design played a huge role — transitions had to feel smooth and intentional, never distracting.

One of the most impactful contributions of this project was establishing a shared design system across Sky's Entertainment team. Before this work, different teams working on TV Guide, Sky Go, and Sky.com were each maintaining their own component libraries — leading to inconsistencies, slow delivery, and duplicated effort.

I led the design side of the Sky Entertainment Design System, working alongside engineers to create a token-based, component-driven library that could scale across platforms. The system introduced semantic colour tokens (so light and dark mode worked automatically), a responsive type scale, standardised interaction states, and motion guidelines.

The result: new feature teams could ship consistent UI in a fraction of the time, and QA processes dramatically shortened because the baseline quality was higher.

The redesigned Sky Entertainment Platform launched across Sky Glass and Sky Go in Q3 2023. The new TV Guide moved away from the rigid hour-based grid as the primary surface — instead, a smart home screen powered by personalisation surfaced the most relevant content for that moment, with the full EPG grid one click away for those who wanted it.

Navigation was simplified from seven top-level categories to four, with contextual sub-navigation emerging based on what you were doing. Live TV, on-demand, and streaming integrations (Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+) were unified into a single browsable surface for the first time.

The mobile experience was fully redesigned to mirror the TV logic — users could start watching on the phone and seamlessly continue on TV, a much-requested feature that now worked fluidly.

This project was one of the most complex I've worked on — not because of any single design problem, but because of the sheer scale of constraint. Every decision touched millions of people with wildly different needs, abilities, and contexts.

If I were starting again, I'd invest more heavily in accessibility research at the beginning rather than retrofitting it later. We made the platform significantly more accessible, but it was harder work than it needed to be. Accessibility should always be a founding principle, not a feature.

I'd also push earlier for a unified content model between TV and mobile. The technical debt from treating them as separate products added months to the delivery timeline. The design solution was clear early — the engineering alignment took much longer.

That said, the project taught me more about design at scale than anything else in my career. Collaboration, communication and trust — between design, engineering, product, and research — were ultimately the most important tools I used.