Case Study: Building a cross-platform design language for Channel 4 streaming

A strategic engagement to unify experience standards across web, mobile and Connected TV

Channel 4 set out to evolve its streaming service into a more cohesive, future-ready product, one that feels like a single Channel 4 experience whether audiences are browsing on mobile, watching on Connected TV, or picking up where they left off on the web.

Spicy Mango and FX Digital partnered once again to support Channel 4 as a blended design team. By combining Spicy Mango’s OTT product and platform expertise with FX Digital’s Connected TV interaction design heritage, we helped Channel 4 evolve a coherent cross-platform design language that works consistently across web, mobile and the biggest screen in the home.

With Channel 4 continuing to drive the product vision, strategy and roadmap, Spicy Mango and FX Digital were appointed to support the redesign as a blended design team under Channel 4’s product direction - not simply to produce screens, but to help establish a shared design language and scalable ways of working that could be applied consistently across platforms and over time.

The engagement focused on aligning stakeholders around clear experience principles, translating them into reusable patterns, and creating delivery-ready design assets that could be implemented reliably by Channel 4’s internal teams and external partners.

The strategic challenge

When a streaming product grows across platforms, inconsistency creeps in. Teams move quickly, features ship in isolation, and the experience starts to fragment: navigation behaves differently, content is presented inconsistently, and core journeys vary by device.

For audiences, that fragmentation shows up as friction and uncertainty. For product teams, it shows up as slower delivery, increased rework, and difficulty maintaining quality at pace, especially when multiple partners and workstreams are involved.

Channel 4’s redesign required more than isolated improvements. It needed a unifying framework: a coherent experience language, cross-platform interaction standards, and an operating rhythm that kept design and delivery aligned.

What we aimed to enable

Working under Channel 4’s product leadership, we focused on establishing foundations that would scale:

• A single experience language expressed consistently across web, mobile and Connected TV

• A set of cross-platform interaction principles that respect different input models while maintaining behavioural equivalence

• A strengthened system of patterns, components and states that reduces fragmentation as the roadmap evolves

• A practical design-to-build operating model that improves alignment, decision-making and handover quality across teams

Our approach: from screens to system

We treated the work as the creation of an extensible product design framework, applied to the highest-impact areas of the service.

Establish shared experience principles

We aligned Channel 4 stakeholders around clear principles to guide decision-making - reducing subjective debates and creating a consistent definition of quality across platforms.

This clarified what should be:

• consistent everywhere (identity, hierarchy, key behaviours)

• equivalent across devices (interaction intent, outcomes)

• platform-specific by necessity (input patterns, constraints)

Define a cross-platform interaction model

Connected TV introduces different constraints and expectations: remote navigation, focus states, lean-back browsing and distance viewing. We brought Connected TV expertise into the same design language, ensuring patterns worked as well on the biggest screen in the home as they did on touch and web.

The goal wasn’t uniformity. It was coherence: a product that behaves predictably, even when interaction differs.

Build scalable experience patterns across core journeys

We applied the design language to the moments that matter most in streaming, ensuring consistency across discovery, selection and viewing - while supporting commercial and membership journeys that are critical to the service.

This work spanned interconnected areas including:

• editorial entry points and discovery surfaces

• navigation, search and content presentation patterns

• VOD and live playback journeys, including end-of-playback behaviours

• account, membership and preference management

• trust foundations such as consent, parental controls and error handling

Make it buildable and repeatable

A design language only becomes valuable when teams can implement it consistently. We produced delivery-quality design assets and documentation, aligned to Channel 4’s standards where available, with clear states, variants and behavioural guidance - so delivery teams could build with confidence and reduce rework.

Ways of working: design governance that supports pace

A key part of the engagement was establishing a dependable rhythm that improved alignment and auditability across stakeholders and delivery partners.

This included:

• a managed design backlog and artefact inventory to keep scope and progress transparent

• regular design ceremonies to maintain quality and alignment as work evolved

• explicit documentation of rationale and trade-offs to speed up decisions and reduce churn

• design decision tracking to maintain clarity on what was agreed, by whom, and why

• risk and dependency management to prevent late-stage surprises during delivery

The outcome was a more repeatable approach to design delivery - one that supports speed without sacrificing coherence.

What changed

The redesign created a more unified Channel 4 streaming experience, expressed through:

• A coherent design language applied consistently across platforms

• Reusable interaction patterns designed to scale across new features and surfaces

• Improved cross-team alignment through shared principles, clearer decisions and build-ready artefacts

• A stronger foundation for delivery across internal squads and external partners

Strategic benefits

This engagement helped Channel 4 move from cross-platform inconsistency to a more coherent, scalable streaming experience- supported by standards and ways of working designed to endure beyond a single release.

• A shared design language across platforms that protects brand coherence as the product evolves

• Reduced fragmentation risk through reusable patterns and clear behavioural equivalence across touch, mouse/keyboard and remote control

• Faster, more confident delivery enabled by clearer specifications, documented decisions and better alignment across delivery partners

• Lower cost of change over time through system-led design thinking rather than one-off screen design

• A stronger foundation for future opportunities, including new surfaces, features and commercial journeys, without re-inventing core patterns

About Spicy Mango

Spicy Mango partners with media, sports and entertainment organisations to design and deliver digital products that perform in the real world. We bring deep expertise in OTT and streaming platforms, with a focus on building coherent experiences across web, mobile and Connected TV. Our teams combine product thinking with practical delivery experience, helping clients align stakeholders, establish scalable experience standards, and create implementation-ready design assets that support long-term roadmap evolution.

About FX Digital

FX Digital is a specialist digital studio with strong heritage in Connected TV and multi-platform experience design. The team brings deep expertise in designing interaction patterns that work for remote-first, lean-back viewing contexts, while remaining consistent with broader product design languages across mobile and web. FX Digital supports clients to create intuitive, high-performing experiences for the biggest screen in the home, grounded in usability, clarity and platform-specific heuristics.

Learn more about FX Digital at fxdigital.uk