The Problem

A+E had no subscription product

The business goal was to create HISTORY's first subscription video-on-demand product. There was no existing SVOD foundation to build on, no established patterns, and a hard commercial need to get to market.

The Constraint

Roku first, and fast

We needed HISTORY Vault on Roku quickly. So we gathered around a table and brainstormed what the OTT app should be and do. That speed requirement shaped everything: it meant designing for the most constrained platform first — a TV remote, a ten-foot interface, limited interaction — rather than designing for the richest platform and cutting down.

Two principles guided the work. Be simple: reduce until only the essential elements remain. Humanize: design for people, not devices; make things better, not just different.

Launch

Roku, then everywhere

HISTORY Vault launched on Roku, then rolled out across six platforms: Roku, Apple TV, iOS, Android, Web, and Chromecast. Each brought its own conventions — Material Design on Android, the ten-foot interface on TV, responsive breakpoints on web — and each had to feel native to its platform while remaining recognizably one product. A rebrand later drove another full round of iteration across all six.

Roku TV interface designed for ten-foot viewing experience

iOS

From ten feet to ten inches

The Roku design gave us a spine: a structure simple enough to work with nothing but a remote and a directional pad. Moving to iOS inverted every assumption behind it. Someone holding a phone can touch, scroll, and search, and will tolerate a density of content a TV interface never could. Rather than shrinking the TV layout onto a phone, I rebuilt browsing around what the handheld context made possible — [what specifically did you add or change? search, deeper hierarchy, richer metadata on cards, portrait scrolling?] — while keeping the underlying content model identical, so a viewer moving from their phone to their TV never had to relearn the product.

iOS app interface and navigation

Android

Native conventions, one product

Android users expect Android. I designed to Material Design conventions rather than mirroring the iOS app — [name one or two real ones: navigation patterns, back behavior, elevation, typography] — so the product felt native rather than transplanted. The harder line to hold was between platform-native and brand-consistent: the interaction patterns had to change, while the content hierarchy, structure, and identity stayed recognizably the same product across all six platforms.

Android app interface optimized for Material Design

Web

One product, every screen size

Web was the only platform without a fixed context. A Roku sits ten feet from a couch; a phone sits in a hand. The browser could be any of them — a laptop at a desk, a tablet on a couch, a phone on a commute — so the design had to hold up across every breakpoint rather than optimize for one. I designed the browse experience to reflow around the content model rather than a device: the same collections, the same hierarchy — so the product stayed recognizably itself whether it opened on a thirteen-inch screen or a thirty-inch one.

Responsive web interface for desktop and mobile browsers

Lifetime Movie Club

A second product, a different viewer

Within a year, Lifetime Movie Club launched — a second SVOD product across the same six platforms, built on the shared foundation A+E had developed rather than from scratch. Same platform conventions, entirely different problem: where HISTORY Vault organized hundreds of hours of episodic documentary, Lifetime Movie Club surfaced a library of exclusive movies for a different audience with different browsing habits.

That contrast is where the design work went. The foundation carried the components and platform patterns; my work went into what was genuinely different — the brand, the audience, and how a movie library wants to be browsed compared to a documentary archive.

iOS app interface and navigation

Android app optimized for Material Design

Responsive web design for all screen sizes

Outcome

Two subscription products, each running across five platforms — ten platform launches in total. HISTORY Vault took a year to reach all five. Lifetime Movie Club took six months. The second product shipped in half the time because it didn't start from zero: the platform conventions, components, and patterns already existed, so the design work could go to what was actually different about it. Both products are still live and still being iterated on today.