FiOS - Designing the Right Way

01

I started by reframing the interface around the realities of ten-foot viewing. Rather than choosing a menu model on visual preference alone, I evaluated competing approaches against customer familiarity, remote-control behavior, device capability, content scale, accessibility, business objectives, and future growth. That gave the team shared criteria for deciding what the experience needed to make legible, predictable, and easy to operate from across the room.

02

From there, I treated the top-level menu, Guide, content discovery, program details, and playback as one connected information architecture. I mapped how focus should move through destinations, grids, rails, metadata, and controls; what should happen after every directional press; and how Back should restore context. The resulting hierarchy revealed information progressively, so viewers could understand where they were, what was selected, and what would happen after pressing OK.

03

I then used motion prototypes, video compositing, and remote-driven flows to test the system in context instead of judging isolated screens. The work had to stay readable over changing imagery, return immediate focus feedback on constrained hardware, tolerate incomplete or delayed metadata, and preserve captions, alternate audio, reduced-motion, and other accessibility states. I translated those decisions into reusable navigation, hierarchy, motion, performance, and handoff rules the wider product team could carry forward.