Multi-platform TV Service

Designed one of the world's largest multiplatform TV services

Fjord — Design Lead — Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo — 2018

CONTEXT

Globo is one of the largest television networks in the world and plays a central role in everyday life in Brazil. When we started working on Globoplay, streaming was already reshaping media consumption globally, but Brazil came with its own realities: massive scale, uneven connectivity, and an audience using everything from feature phones to smart TVs. The task was to design a multi-platform service that could carry Globo’s content into a digital future without excluding large parts of the population.

MANDATE & TRUST

I was working at Fjord and relocated to Brazil to work on site. We started as a small pilot team inside Accenture, with limited resources but high expectations. The mandate was exploratory at first, but quickly became critical as adoption and visibility grew. Trust was built through delivery. As the service gained traction, the work expanded in scope and importance, eventually contributing to Fjord opening a permanent studio in São Paulo.

MY ROLE & TEAM

I led a distributed design team across Brazil, Spain, and Germany, working hands-on while coordinating across locations. Beyond design, I helped set up the working environment itself — first inside Accenture’s offices, later in improvised spaces that became our de-facto studio. The team worked closely with Globo stakeholders, engineers, and product owners, often under tight timelines and shifting priorities.

THE REAL PROBLEM

This was not about designing a “nice streaming app.”
It was about designing for heterogeneity. Globoplay needed to work for tens of millions of users, across very different devices, bandwidth conditions, and usage patterns — while still feeling like one coherent product.
The challenge was consistency without uniformity.

DESIGN DECISIONS

The core design decision was to treat Globoplay as a system, not a collection of interfaces. We designed a shared interaction and content model that could adapt across platforms — mobile, tablet, desktop, and TV — without fragmenting the experience. Navigation, hierarchy, and content discovery followed the same logic everywhere, even when interaction patterns differed. Design decisions were tested early through prototypes and real content, not abstract wireframes. The focus was on clarity, discoverability, and continuity across contexts.

OPERATING MODEL

The work was fast, pragmatic, and highly collaborative. Research and co-creation happened continuously, often informally. Methods were adapted to reality — including ad-hoc recruitment and guerrilla testing when time or access was limited. The team had to deliver while the product was already gaining public attention. Design, engineering, and product worked in tight loops, adjusting decisions as constraints became visible.

OUTCOMES & SIGNALS

Globoplay launched successfully and reached massive adoption within its first year. The service achieved tens of millions of users, millions of app downloads, and was recognized as App of the Year. More importantly, it established a scalable, multi-platform foundation for Globo’s digital services and marked a shift toward streaming as a core part of the organization’s future.

REFLECTION

This project reinforced a simple lesson: at scale, elegance comes from structure, not polish. Designing for millions means accepting variability — in devices, connectivity, and behavior — and still delivering something coherent. Globoplay showed how design can hold complexity together without flattening it.