Deepikaa Raju/Portfolio

Case Studies

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Case Studies

About Me

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TATA Play

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TATA Play

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TATA Play

Designing the movies discovery experience for a Platform as a Service(PaaS) product that unifies contents from 27+ OTT platforms. live TV and VOD under one roof.

Project Duration:

3 Months

TATA Play

Designing the movies discovery experience for a Platform as a Service(PaaS) product that unifies contents from 27+ OTT platforms. live TV and VOD under one roof.

Project Duration:

3 Months

TATA Play

Designing the movies discovery experience for a Platform as a Service(PaaS) product that unifies contents from 27+ OTT platforms. live TV and VOD under one roof.

Project Duration:

3 Months

OTT & Media

B2B PaaS

UI & UX Design

I designed the Movies experience within a white label Android TV launcher in aggregator model unifying 27+ OTT platforms, Live TV & Video on Demand(VOD), powering TATA Play’s global streaming Platform as a Service(PaaS) offering.

How Might We design a unified Android TV experience that aggregates 27+ OTT & Live TV services while enabling seamless discovery, personalisation and social viewing on a single screen?. The work delivered:

aggregated into one launcher

aggregator service in india

addressable users unlocked by going device-agnostic in India

aggregated into one launcher

aggregator service in india

addressable users unlocked by going device-agnostic in India

Role

UI & UX Designer - Movies Section

Team

6 UI/UX Designers

10 Developers

1 Manager

1 Business Analyst

Skills

UX Research

UI Design & Design Systems

Stakeholders Communication

Context & Scope

The Challenge

Bringing together 27+ OTT platforms, Live TV, Video on Demand(VOD) into a single Android TV launcher required rethinking discovery at ecosystem scale. The critical challenge was designing a unified experience that supported universal search, language preferences, and personalisation while preserving individual platform identities and accommodating distinct content libraries, subscription tiers, and Content Delivery Network(CDN) infrastructures, all within the constraints of four directional keys and a single select button.

My Responsibilities

Led the design of the Movies experience within the launcher, ensuring seamless discovery across OTT, Live TV and VOD content
Collaborated with designers owning Shows, Sports, Live TV and My TV to maintain consistency across the platform
Worked closely with product managers and engineers to translate requirements into TV native interaction patterns
Addressed design and technical constraints in real time while adapting the experience for remote based navigation
Contributed to the shared design system to ensure scalable components across the white label platform

The Scope

MVP version of the product was launched with 8 core sections. I owned the Movies Section end -to-end

Research & Discovery

Domain Research

We studied the hybrid IPTV landscape to understand how OTT platforms, Live TV and VOD services coexist within a single ecosystem.

Unlike standalone streaming apps, an aggregated launcher must integrate multiple content infrastructures, each with its own browsing patterns, metadata structures and interface conventions.

This meant the platform had to function less like an individual app and more like a content layer above multiple services

Platform Ecosystem

The Hybrid IPTV launcher acts as an aggregation layer between content providers and end users. Rather than hosting content, it unifies discovery while streaming continues through the original OTT platforms

The platform acts as an orchestration layer that unifies content discovery across multiple streaming services while maintaining playback within source ecosystems.

Audience Segment

Competitive Analysis

The competitive landscape was mapped across platforms that define today’s fragmented streaming experience, allowing the design to respond to real-world constraints around aggregation, access, and content discovery.

Most platforms optimise discovery within their own ecosystem, not across services.

User Persona & Journey

Both represent the core tension of the product: speed and simplicity for the individual vs. personalisation and safety for the family. Every design decision for the Movies section was tested against both.

Key Insights

The research revealed 8 major points

Design Thinking & Trade-off

Design Decision Framework

Design decisions were shaped by the following 5 constraints.

Exploring Opportunities

The 8 key insights along with the 5 constraints led to some floating thoughts & ideas.

We condensed all the floating ideas to a list of features. They were segregated into MVP features, some scoped for future release, some under consideration and 2 rejected

Final Design

The Visual Foundation - Design System

A shared component system built to support the full 8-section product, with Movies-specific components contributed as reusable primitives for the broader platform team.

[famework]

The Screens

The Hybrid IPTV launcher acts as an aggregation layer between content providers and end users.

[Screens]

3 Things I carry forward

Constraints are the breif

Designing for a TV remote, four directions, one select forced decisions a touch-first designer would never encounter. Every interaction had to be reachable from every other interaction. That is not a limitation. That is clarity. I now treat constraints as the primary design input, not an obstacle to route around.

What I'd do differently? I would map the full 4 key reachability graph before starting any screen design, not as a QA step at the end. It would have caught unreachable states earlier and reduced iteration cycles significantly

Product Timing Matters

My most inventive ideas were the ones pulled back, not because they were wrong, but because the product was not ready for them. A new platform entering a market cannot ask users to relearn behaviours at onboarding. Knowing when to save an idea for v2 is a real and underrated design skill.

What I'd do differently? I would build a clearer case for deferred futures upfront, documenting them in version 2 backlog during review sessions other than accepting rejection as a dead end. showing stakeholders where ideas live post-launch makes the deferral feel strategic, not like a loss.

Backend Cost is a Design Constraint

The B&W; cast photo decision was not aesthetic, it was infrastructure. Two image versions per actor across 27+ platforms adds up fast in CDN costs. Understanding the cost of a design decision beyond Figma made me a more complete designer. I now ask engineering about downstream implications before proposing visual features.

What I'd do differently? I would establish a "design cost conversation" with engineering early in every project, not to limit ambition, but to surface the infrastructure reality before it becomes a blocker at review round 4..

Behind the Scenes

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deepikaraju09@gmail.com