Cal Howarth | Portfolio

Sky TV

Employer Project

Project Overview

Project Details

A blue-sky thinking group project with Sky Tv exploring a fully voice activated TV experience. We focused on designing the onboarding flow to build user confidence, improve feature discoverability and make the experience more inclusive.

Project Details

The Problem

Customers using Sky OS’s voice control features often face challenges with recognition accuracy, discoverability of features, and consistency in experience across different regions and languages. This leads to frustration, underutilisation of voice capabilities, and a drop in overall user satisfaction. There is a need to design a voice control experience that is intuitive, inclusive, and optimised for a global audience to increase feature adoption and improve the overall product experience

The Problem

My Role

UX/UI Designer - Collaborative contributor across ideation, research, wire framing, user testing and mid-fidelity design

My Role

UX/UI Designer - Collaborative contributor across ideation, research, wire framing, user testing and mid-fidelity design

Tools

Figma, Miro, User Interviews, Surveys

Tools

Figma, Miro, User Interviews, Surveys

Solution

We designed an interactive onboarding flow for Sky Glass that introduces users to the voice assistant in an inclusive, personalised, and intuitive way.

The flow acknowledges different user need through voiceprints, contextual awareness, and guided prompts, helping users understand and adopt voice control features from the start.

Research and Assumptions

Knowns

Elderly users rely on voice for daily tasks

Gesture control supports users who can’t speak or use remotes steadily

Unknowns

Accessibility barriers within current Sky voice UX

Which support features are most valuable?

How users learn gestures

Assumptions

Users with speech or motor impairments struggle with rigid commands

Reminders could help users with cognitive impairments

Adding gestures could improve accessibility for hearing impaired users

Knowns

Users want voice control to feel natural and responsive

Elderly users rely on voice for daily tasks

Gesture control supports users who can’t speak or use remotes steadily

We ran five interviews to understand habits, frustrations, and expectations around voice and gesture interaction.

Voice use: 4/5 regularly use assistants (Siri, Alexa) for quick tasks.

Expectations: Accuracy and accent flexibility were key; users want tolerance for mispronunciations.

Frustrations: Recognition errors (4/5), over-activation (2/5), shallow responses.

Interaction: Users repeat/rephrase before switching to manual input.

AI vs Voice: 3/5 prefer AI for search due to more relevant, tailored answers.

TV habits: Discovery often happens outside the platform. Users want better search tools (e.g. mood-based, trailers, “similar to X,” lists).

Persona

Ideation

Inclusivity

We explored implementing an interactive assistant that actively acknowledges user input, creating a more natural and inclusive interaction.

Contextual Awareness

Ideas focused on enabling Sky Glass to detect the primary viewer, allowing the assistant to offer contextually relevant suggestions based on who’s watching.

Personalised Experience

We considered allowing users to register their voiceprints, improving recognition accuracy and enabling the system to identify individual speakers.

Voice Control Guidance

Concepts centred on providing clear, integrated guidance to help users discover and learn the full range of voice control capabilities.

Wireframing Workflow