Designing MO, the anchor of a 12-app NextGenTV ecosystem for civic services, safety, local discovery, fundraising, and community participation.
I led a team of five designers on a 12-app ecosystem for NextGenTV, the broadcast standard that lets television carry data services alongside video. MO sat at the center: a TV-first launcher, shared profile, and community home surface. This page walks through the problems the living room created, the process that worked through them, and the decisions that answered them.
The MO home surface. Local awareness leads, the ecosystem stays one focus-step away.
The project at a glance: what it was, who did it, and what it produced.
The ecosystem treated the television as a local service layer. A household could see what was happening around it, act on it, and carry recognition for participation across every app. The platform was built for taking part in the place you live.
The work supported a go-to-market joint venture between Mobius and Ark Multicasting and contributed design material to its CES 2024 pitch.
Context for everything that follows: the capability shift that made a television ecosystem worth designing at all.
ATSC 3.0 lets a broadcast tower carry app data alongside video. One signal reaches every receiver in range at no per-user cost, and a broadband return path lets the television answer back. Each application in this ecosystem rode its own slice of that signal, which gave every app its own channel on the TV.
That was the argument for the television: reach without an install step, and zero per-user delivery cost.
The most common screen in the home could now carry local services and answer back. The project question: what useful actions could people take through TV if it became aware of their community?
This section defines what made the project hard. Each problem is drawn before it is described, and each one names the section of this page where it gets solved.
Each app rode its own broadcast slice, so each arrived on the television as its own channel. The architecture guaranteed access. It also guaranteed fragmentation.
An emergency app must carry urgency without panic. A fundraising app must feel warm. A civic app must feel accountable. Twelve products across seven domains needed different emotional registers, and the set still had to read as one ecosystem on one screen.
The UX process, stated honestly. This was concept-to-pitch work inside a larger cross-functional initiative, so a tight working loop stood in for a formal research program.
Direction came from three inputs: what the broadcast platform could actually do, published TV design guidance from the major platforms, and recurring working reviews with the venture's stakeholders. Every design decision on this page traces back to one of those three.
Understand the platform's real constraints. Study published TV design guidance. Frame the three problems.
Output: the rules in 06Decide what the center owns: identity, awareness, recognition, passage. Map every app's relationship to it.
Output: the decision in 07Home surface, alert modules, entry rail, profile. Several passes, reviewed with stakeholders.
Output: the surface in 08Five designers across twelve apps. Eight style guides on one shared foundation kept the set coherent.
Output: the system in 09Design material, ecosystem story, and screens assembled for the CES 2024 business pitch.
Output: the result in 11The interaction rules every app in the ecosystem had to follow. Android TV guidance was the base, checked against tvOS and Fire TV patterns, then adapted for civic, emergency, and community use.
Every primary action is reachable with up, down, left, right, and select. No pointer, no gestures, no exceptions.
Focus states are oversized and luminous, readable from the couch without hunting for a cursor.
Type scale, spacing, and card sizes are set from a living-room viewing distance.
Cool, dark surfaces sit in a living room without glare.
Televisions crop the frame edge. Nothing critical lives in the outer margin.
Civic and emergency flows compress to the shortest possible path. Comprehension first, action next.
The TV is a household screen. Personal detail stays off it and continues on the phone.
The TV starts a task; deeper steps continue on the phone, web, or desktop without losing the thread.
Grounded in Android TV's Design for TV guidance, the Apple tvOS Human Interface Guidelines, and Amazon Fire TV design guidance, adapted for utility, civic, emergency, and community use.
The single architecture decision that defined MO: not a portal the apps live inside, but the layer they share.
A standalone channel per app was a property of the broadcast architecture, so a hub could never be the only door. MO was designed as what the standalone apps share instead: one profile, one reward record, one local-awareness feed, one place the ecosystem is visible as a whole. An app opened from its own channel still works alone. The same app opened through MO arrives with identity, context, and recognition attached.
The decision came down to what the center owns. Four things:
The business proposition was direct: MO is the landing surface of the television, the super app the rest of the ecosystem opens from. Institutions publish alerts, services, causes, and offers into the platform, and the household meets all of it on MO first.
The core MO surface I designed, shown as it evolved: the pass that failed, the pass that shipped, and the calls that separate them.
Why it failed: it read like every streaming launcher. Apps owned the surface, the local advisory was a footnote, and nothing signalled that this television knew its neighborhood.
What changed: local awareness took the lead position, the ecosystem moved to a rail one focus-step away, and the profile became visible on the home surface. Familiar enough to navigate, different enough to signal this is not another streaming home.
The TV starts tasks. The phone, web, and desktop finish them.
How twelve products held together without looking identical, and how five designers worked in parallel without drifting apart.
The split was explicit. Everything that makes a TV usable was shared and non-negotiable. Tone, color, and typographic voice stayed local to each app. The per-app style guides below are the artifact of that split, and they are what made parallel work across the team possible: a designer could move fast inside their app because the foundation was already settled.
Owned centrally. No app may override these.
Owned by each app's designer.
Select a card to see its component snapshot.
Representative products, each with the problem it carried and its route back to MO.
Make civic reporting simple for residents while supporting the crews who resolve it.
Through MO: issue prompts and status updates
Show rich local context on a TV without overloading the screen.
Through MO: the local awareness layer
Communicate urgency without panic, and help people act with confidence.
Through MO: alerts and response entry points
Build trust and emotional clarity around giving.
Through MO: causes as participation opportunities
Make local discovery easy to navigate from the couch.
Through MO: discovery on the home surface
Make household intelligence readable across devices.
Through MO: energy behavior feeds recognitionThe behavioral layer: which incentives the ecosystem uses, which it refuses, and how recognition earned in any app rolls up into one identity.
Octalysis was the basis for defining gamification across the ecosystem. Its eight core drivers sit at fixed positions on an octagon, and the position carries meaning. The top half holds drivers that feel good to act on, the bottom half holds drivers that work through pressure. The left side is external reward, the right side is internal motivation.
Each driver, with its meaning read at the node.
Five drivers shaped the model. All five sit in the top half.
Three drivers were available and left out. All three sit in the bottom half.
Level progress and a running point total, sized for a television. Progress is stated, and no part of it decays.
Rewards screen. Progress path along the top, badge shelf below it, quests at the bottom. Earned badges carry color, unearned ones stay locked in the same grid, which is the ownership driver made visible. No countdowns, no streaks, no penalty for stopping.
One profile holds everything earned anywhere in the ecosystem. Standing is visible on the card itself.
Profile, list treatment. Ambassador status and the point total sit in the header. Per-app tallies run in a row beneath it.
Profile, card treatment. The same content with the member card given weight and tallies along a curve. Both keep identity, standing, and points in one frame.
Per-app tallies in detail. Each ecosystem app keeps its own count, and the sum sits beside the member name. This is the recognition own from section 07 in its shipped form.
Reputation attaches to a person, and a television is shared. Profile selection runs before any of it.
Profile selection. Points, badges, and standing belong to whoever is signed in, so the household picks a profile first. Without this screen, one person's civic record would absorb the whole household's activity.
Badge naming and illustration were explored separately from the incentive model. The names visible in these frames come from that exploration and were not settled.
The award moment was tested at television scale: one badge filling the screen, legible across a room, with the reason stated in a single line underneath.
Recognition extends past the screen. A consistent record of participation could qualify for perks from local businesses. That link is what makes the refusals load-bearing: a reputation with real-world value has to be earned through contribution. Pressure to keep a streak alive would earn the same standing for the wrong reason.
The concrete outputs, stated without inflation, and what the project changed in how I design.
Coherence in a single app is flows, components, and consistency. Coherence in an ecosystem is shared identity, shared value exchange, and a reason for each product to exist inside the system.
The hard part of this work was holding twelve products to one foundation while each kept its own tone. The leadership work was that reconciliation. It changed what I check first in any multi-product problem: who owns identity, where recognition lives, and what the center is allowed to own.