The 10-Foot Experience
All work
Consumer product · 2018–2021

The 10-foot experience — designing for the couch

A white-label TV app with poor usability and 72% customer satisfaction needed a complete redesign. We convinced stakeholders we could build it better, faster, and cheaper in-house — and shipped an app that hit 86% satisfaction on launch.

Overview

A white-label app that didn't feel like Redbox

Before I joined the CE Devices team, the Redbox TV app was a white-labeled third-party product. It had an outdated, complicated interface that looked nothing like the rest of the Redbox experience. Customer satisfaction sat at 72% "Satisfied" or "Highly Satisfied" — low for an app with a relatively simple purpose.

Product wanted to hire a third party to build a replacement. My visual design partner and I made the case that we could deliver a better experience ourselves — cheaper, and within the same timeline. We succeeded.

The 10-foot constraint

"Designing for a TV means designing for distance, a remote control, and someone who is already ready to watch — not browse."

This shaped every decision: shallow navigation, minimal text, price-forward hierarchy, and prototypes tested with remote-controlled interactions rather than mouse clicks.

Research & discovery

Learning the 10-foot experience

  1. 01 People don't read on a TV. Limit text to only what's needed. Show rather than tell.
  2. 02 Remote controls change everything. What's one tap on mobile can be 20 button presses on a TV. Navigation depth and text input had to be minimised.
  3. 03 Processing power varies wildly. Smart TVs can be sluggish — heavy animations hurt performance. Gaming consoles are the opposite — a lack of transitions reads as cheap.
  4. 04 Redbox customers are price-sensitive. Competitors assume customers want quality; Redbox customers expect the lowest price. This shaped the entire content hierarchy.
  5. 05 People arrive ready to watch. Extra features, complicated navigation, and too much browsing all work against the user's actual goal.

Information architecture

Shallow navigation, by design

Since Redbox isn't a regularly recognised streaming provider, it was important to allow customers to browse without signing in. I designed a shallow navigation structure to limit complexity — fewer levels, faster path to content.

The complete app workflow was documented in a wireframe created in Sketch, reviewed and approved with stakeholders before any visual design began.

Complete app workflow wireframe

Wireframes & prototyping

Wireframe of the Redbox TV app, 2019
Wireframe created in Sketch. Prototypes were built in Marvel for early testing, then moved to Protopie to simulate remote control behavior — which produces significantly different feedback than mouse-click prototypes.

Before & after

Redbox Roku app, 2017 — before redesign
Before: the 2017 white-label Roku app. Poor performance, low usability scores, off-brand.
Redbox Vizio app, 2021 — after redesign
After: the 2021 Vizio visual design, created by me using the updated design system.

Specification

Supporting the visual design with detailed logic

After wireframes were approved, the visual designer created the final screens. I followed up with detailed specification notes to capture interaction logic — things like how title art behaves in a library, edge cases for different content types, and platform-specific constraints.

Detailed specification notes for TV app logic

Ongoing development

Perks feature wireframe
New Perks feature workflow — added in response to customer feedback.
Perks status modal wireframe
Perks status and join modal, validated with remote-controlled Protopie prototype before build.

Visual design

Roku button breakdown visual design
Roku platform button styles — designed by me to meet Roku's size and behavior requirements while maintaining the cross-platform design system.

Outcome

From 72% to 86%.

86%

Customer satisfaction on launch ("Satisfied" or "Highly Satisfied")

72%→

Starting satisfaction score with the white-label app

↓cost

Delivered in-house for less than the third-party quote

We convinced stakeholders we could build something better ourselves — and the satisfaction scores validated it on launch. The app shipped on-brand, on time, and within budget, and continued to evolve with new features validated through remote-controlled prototype testing.

Reflection

What I carried forward

This project taught me that the medium is the constraint. Every design principle I'd learned on mobile and web needed to be re-examined for a 10-foot experience. The shift to Protopie for remote-controlled prototyping was one of the most valuable methodological changes I made — mouse-click testing on a TV prototype produces fundamentally different (and misleading) feedback.