Google TV | Case Studies

Google TV

Google TV is entertainment you love with a little help from Google. For a year and a half, we worked with the Google TV team to create an intuitive, content-first experience that helps you answer the question, “what should I watch?”.

Creating a uniquely Google experience

Over the past decade, the way we watch TV has changed radically. The reasons we watch are the same, yet an explosion of choice in content and streaming providers has led to a fragmented ecosystem of apps and experiences—rich with options yet bewilderingly siloed and cumbersome to navigate.

We worked with the Google TV team to translate the elegance, smarts, and delight of Google throughout moments of the product experience.

Through multidisciplinary collaboration across our and Google TV’s teams, we led design, writing, and strategy initiatives, ranging from updating the beloved boot screen animations, exploring the new brand identity and UX expressions, establishing system-wide motion and interaction patterns, and envisioning future states. This work helped expedite the delivery of Google TV experiences to the end user.

Google phone navigation with a colorful circle grid.

It's been fun to work across so many points of the product design lifecycle. It really highlights the need of modern brands to establish consistency across increasingly complex ecosystems of user touchpoints while maintaining a forward-looking vision that ensures growth and innovation.

Dan SchechterExecutive Creative Director, Instrument

Illustration of two people facing each other and a close up of an eyeball.

Four grids showing: standard, browse, enter, and exit.

Designing for the home, and the family

TV is often a shared experience in a shared space. It’s both personal as well as communal. A common need for families is the ability to provide an experience tailored to different members of the household. Google TV provides a unique space for children that brings fun content to the whole family while providing thoughtful controls for parents. To create an inviting and imaginative space, we illustrated a bespoke interface just for kids. Customizable by theme, the interface is designed to delight.

Kids Google TV home screen in a very plain white living room.

Kids illustrations with a rocket and astronaut in space with little avatars including one of a bird and one of a crocodile.

Building a vision for the future

While working on the launch of Google TV, we also helped architect a vision for its future. Considering the unique role of TV in the home, we envisioned a possible future of multi-user interfaces that seamlessly adapts to whoever’s in the room and extends across the Google ecosystem for a richer viewing experience.

Our vision work defined guiding principles, explored features that integrate with and extend the Google ecosystem and culminated in a live action vision video showcasing the potential of the nascent platform.