Television Interface Designing is different. Entirely.

The television is probably one of the, if not the most, viewed interface on this planet. We now live in an era defined by fast food, uber cabs, reality shows and smart TV’s. Riding on this technology, Tata Sky, one of the most widely subscribed service providers across India is once such service that not only brings only a gazillion television channels to choose from but also provides a whole array of ‘ACTIVE’ services to it’s subscribers.

These active services have allowed TATA SKY to provide it’s subscribers what regular televison channels haven’t been able to. 100% customised content and on-demand.

Of the many such services that The Banana Design Co. has had the pleasure of designing, we’d like to feature one of relatively recent interfaces designed named ‘TATA SKY DEVOTION’.

Religion, especially this part of the world, is a sensitive subject. One can never be too sure of what element, icon, sentence, statement or color could hurt anyone’s religious sentiments. So naturally when this service request was put up by the team at Tata Sky, we were excited and concerned at the same time. Think of a kid about to ride his/her first every roller coaster ride. (They just don’t know what to expect).

The challenge was to create a design system that:

• Follows some basic rules of television interfaces
• Creates visual elements not too heavy to support TATA Sky’s systems
• Accommodates four different relegions on the same screen
• Uses colors and elements that do not hurt anyone’s religious sentiments
• Acts as a vehicle to push different kinds of content to most basic user in the simplest manner possible

Fun right! Well it actually was. Our first step was to understand what were we actually designing. As basic as a question this might be, the rabbit hole goes deeper than one would expect.

We were creating a platform that could satiate the users relegious urges by giving them access to mutli-media content specific to their relegion. We already determined that all level 2 screens (inner-screens) and flows were relatively easiser to visualise as the form and nature of content was more or less the same. The bigger concern was, the design language.

How do we show all 4 relegions (segments) on the same screen?

And remember, all this while trying to ensure that’s the interface and navigation needs to be super simple.

One of many unique quirks that India has, is the need for a lot of establishemnts (big or small) to mount relgious figures outside their compound directly on their walls. And these figures aren’t really confined to any one particular relegion. There are a few ‘myths’ as to why this is done.

Those myth’s really weren’t our concern. What was how idenfiable this phenomenon was with almost every individual we asked around. And now we knew what we had to create.

Our design system came up shortly after quite quickly. A couple of rounds of iterations with the client and we had with us a teleivision UI for a relegious service taking care of all our constraints listed above.

TATA SKY DEVOTION is an active service and can be subscribed to by simply navigating over their TATA SKY’s ACTIVE Channels list.

Originally published at thebananadesign.co on November 3, 2017.
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