Bally Sports
Background
Our TV app hadn’t changed in a long time and was originally built using designs from a third-party vendor. As Bally Sports rolled out updated mobile and web experiences, it became clear the TV app needed a fresh look as well. This redesign was about rethinking how TV fits into the broader product and creating a more consistent, connected experience across all platforms.
Services
Product Design
Prototyping
TV Design
Understanding everything television
While designing for the web and mobile is familiar territory, TV is still a relatively new space with its own unique challenges. Screen size, viewing distance, and the platform itself all change how people interact with the product. TV is a “lean-back” experience most viewers are sitting about 10 feet away so clarity, readability, and simplicity matter even more.
Navigation is another key difference. TV users rely on remotes or game controllers, which typically use a directional pad to move through the interface. Unlike touch or mouse input, this type of navigation is more limited, which means designs must be intentional, focused, and easy to navigate through without friction.
Each TV platform comes with its own set of rules and limitations, and understanding those constraints is key to designing a solid experience. Knowing what’s possible and what isn’t helps set the right expectations early on. For example, Roku requires support for manual input fields, which introduced additional design and technical considerations.
To work through this, I partnered closely with engineering to make sure we met platform requirements while still delivering a usable experience. I also reviewed how competitors handled similar patterns to understand what worked well in a TV context. This approach helped us strike a balance between custom solutions and existing platform components, allowing us to ship on time without compromising the overall experience.
Unique challenges
Authentication was one of the trickier problems to solve, largely because TV is a remote-based, lean-back experience. Users expect sign-in to be quick and low effort, especially when they’re navigating with a remote. Our goal was to make it easy for users to connect their Bally Sports account to their TV, while working within the technical limits of the platform.
After exploring a few options, we landed on QR codes for sign-in and sign-up. This pattern was already familiar in many TV apps, which gave us confidence users would understand it right away. We also aligned this approach with a parallel redesign of the web experience, creating a consistent sign-in flow across platforms.
We did consider letting users manually enter their credentials on TV using platform-specific keyboards. However, after reviewing the experience and talking with other designers, we found that this behavior wasn’t widely known and could easily be missed. To reduce friction and avoid confusion, we chose not to rely on that approach.
Adapting to platform requirements
From the beginning, we knew there would be platform-specific differences, but we were committed to keeping the overall experience consistent. Through research and close collaboration with cross-functional partners, we made sure our designs met each platform’s requirements early on. This helped us avoid major rework later and reduced the risk of delays or app rejections during review.
Architrecture exploration for our content offering
Live content is the heart of the Bally Sports experience. Most users come to the app to watch live games, so making that content easy to find is always our top priority. That said, we also had to think through what the experience should look like when there aren’t any live games or events happening.
To handle this, we worked closely with Product and Engineering to define a clear content hierarchy that could adapt based on availability. This ensured the experience still felt intentional and useful, even during off-hours, while keeping live games front and center whenever they were available.
Understanding our regions
As a Regional Sports Network, our content is tied to geography and local teams. What fans can watch depends on their zip code, which introduces some unique edge cases. For example, someone living in Texas could still be blocked from watching local teams if their zip code isn’t recognized in our system even though they’re physically in the state.
Video Playback Capabilities
Each TV platform comes with its own built-in UI components. Given our timelines, we explored a few different ways to approach the design. I put together three options to help the team weigh tradeoffs and align on a direction.
Option 1: Use platform default components only, with no customization.
Option 2: Start with platform defaults, but layer in our brand—typography and color.
Option 3: Fully custom UI, designed to look and behave the same across all platforms.
I walked the team through the pros and cons of each approach in a working session with Product and Engineering. While Option 3 required more engineering effort, we ultimately chose it to deliver a consistent experience and shared functionality across every TV platform.
Conclusion
Led the full redesign of all Bally Sports TV platforms, creating a cohesive experience after years without updates. Simultaneously, developed the accompanying design system, balancing tight timelines and long hours to deliver a polished, unified product.
With TV finished, I shifted my priorities on to the web experience and app experience with the help of a few other designers.
