Bringing families and friends closer than ever, no matter the distance. A real-time, multi-device co-viewing experience designed end-to-end, from blank canvas to shipped product.
Outcome
Watch Together launched in June 2023 as part of a Sky Live software update. Post-launch engagement data confirmed the core design hypothesis: usage peaks during Prime and Early Prime time bands, exactly the living-room, evening co-viewing context the product was built for. Session distribution shows users engaging 1–5 times per week, reflecting purposeful, social usage rather than casual browsing, with daily launches trending upward week over week after launch.
Entry point patterns, PiP overlays, and room-code flows were adopted into the wider Sky TV design system, extending impact beyond Watch Together itself.
Influenced engineering, product, and partnerships through a clear, prioritised design vision, shaping how Sky Live evolved beyond its core camera use cases.
*Note: High-volume customer totals have been abstracted to conversion percentages to honour data privacy and NDA guidelines.
Challenge
Sky Live is the smart camera for the living room, enabling video calling, fitness, and interactive TV experiences. Despite being inherently social hardware, it had no way for users to watch content together remotely.
The brief: design a seamless, multi-device experience that balanced social interaction with uninterrupted viewing, while accommodating varied living-room setups, lighting conditions, and user comfort levels.
How might we create seamless co-viewing experiences that help households feel connected?
Research & approach
Research conducted by Sky's Global Entertainment Research team surfaced a clear emotional need: users wanted to feel present with remote family and friends, not just watch the same content simultaneously. The research identified two distinct watch-together journeys.
The content drives the occasion. Users choose a specific programme or event first, then invite others to join, such as a live match or a series finale.
The social occasion comes first. Users want to spend time together and browse or select content as a group, with connection taking priority over any specific programme.
Two goals anchored the design: make people feel present, and add to the viewing, never interrupt it.
Design process
The project evolved across three phases, each building on the last, with increasing scope and complexity. I moved from Senior UX Designer on the first MVP into a lead role as the product expanded.
Designed the core Watch Together experience: room creation via 9-digit code, synchronised playback, and video calling with PiP. Established the interaction model and design foundations.
Stepped into a lead role as the feature expanded. Integrated multiple entry points across Live Guide, VOD rails, and full-screen playback. Added active speaker view and refined camera controls.
Led post-launch QA and analysed user feedback to identify friction points and fast-follow opportunities. Defined a prioritised backlog and explored how Watch Together could extend across Sky's broader ecosystem.
Establishing the interaction model from scratch: how a TV screen becomes a shared social space. The hard constraint was time. A fixed launch date meant the MVP had to be built from what already existed, a conscious trade rather than a default: launch as fast as possible, then explore richer patterns once the product was live.
Simplified user journey of the create/join experience
Integrating Watch Together into an existing product without disrupting the journeys users already knew. The MVP's separate Create and Join screens meant a wrong choice cost a full reload, so I designed a new Tabs component that let users switch between them instantly. Getting a new element approved into Sky's design system and built by engineering took real cross-team coordination, but it outlived this feature: Tabs became a pattern adopted across EntOS.
One of the biggest unsolved problems with Watch Together was identity. The product shipped with no concept of a persistent user, meaning every session started from scratch with no history, no preferences, and no way to reconnect with the same people. We mapped a three-stage roadmap to fix this. The project was descoped in 2024 before any of it shipped.
A lightweight, session-based display name. No account required. The lowest-friction way to give users a sense of presence and make sessions feel personal without introducing sign-in friction.
A persistent identity tied to the Sky account, enabling recognisable names across sessions and laying the groundwork for a social graph, invite history, and favourite contacts.
Full user profiles with viewing preferences, watch history, and smart suggestions for what to watch together, turning Watch Together from a feature into a social destination.
Watch Together · Film
Reflection
Building interaction models with no existing pattern to borrow from.
Navigating product, design, and engineering teams with competing priorities.
Maintaining design consistency across a multi-year, multi-team timeline.
More work