Xfinity X1
Taking TV to the Cloud
2012 - 2013
Role: Senior Group Director of Product Design
The Xfinity X1 project was a total overhaul of Comcast’s TV ecosystem, moving everything to a cloud-based approach that allowed viewers to access live TV, DVR and on-demand content from any device. My role was group leader of the UX, mobile and PC teams.
Remember set-top boxes?
Those clunky, ugly pieces of hardware were our gateways to TV entertainment, and the interfaces we used to navigate content were baked into a few scant kilobytes of firmware. They weren’t very good.
X1 represented a new visual language to go along with a cloud-based interface.
The TV screen experience could now be flanked with mobile and PC-based experiences that enabled viewers to take their programming with them.
Taking TV on the go
Creating a TV watching interface for phones and tablets wasn’t just a matter of porting UI from TV to small screen. It required different paradigms that felt native to a touch screen while maintaining familiarity with the big screen experience. Tablets were still in their infancy during this project, so many viewing behaviors hadn’t yet been established.
