When I joined the Network Streaming team the Landscape Orientation Designs for Native became one of my initial projects. It was a great introduction into the products that the team built and maintained.
When I joined the Network Streaming team, one of my first projects was designing Landscape Orientation for our Native Tablet apps—a great way to dive into the products the team built and maintained.
| Role | Wireframing, Design Library Maintenance, Prototyping, High fidelity mockups |
|---|---|
| Collaborators | Susie Sobota, Danny Kim, Jason Grotian, Kamil, Pierzchalski, Annika Pranger |
| Tools | Figma, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Notion |
| Teams | Kids AVOD, ENT AVOD |
Before I joined, UX Research found that parents and kids could only browse shows in Portrait mode, meaning adults had to pick up the tablet to choose content, then rotate it to watch. Based on that insight, my manager Susie asked me to review all tablet screens—including upcoming features like the Featured Carousel—to adapt them for Landscape.
Data insight showing the amount of devices kids have access too. Source: Common Sense Media.
Using native tablet spacing and layout guidelines, I focused on margins and spacing and the imagery ratios. To make sure once in Landscape mode that the screen still felt similar to Portrait just extended. I also had to play around with the navigation padding. Without padding the navigation extended the width of the device but that might hinder the user having to stretch their thumbs or fingers to find the tab they need.
I then landed on a padding that held the tabs close together so that the user can easily get to them, and not accidentally press the tabs, if the user(mostly kids) were holding the device with their left and right hands.
iOS and Android Native Tablet navigation specs.
Once the designs where finalized and handed off to Native App developers we would go through a process of QA to make sure that the designs were being adhered to thoroughly. During this process I found that the navigation bars were needing to add in the extra padding in order to be consistent with my designs. After talking with the developers about this for both Android and iOS they made the necessary adjustments and that was one of the issues found during VQA.
Finally when the feature was live users were able to toggle the orientation to Landscape or Portrait this helped family’s mostly view content through their tablet without having to rotate it. There was an uptick in content consumed shortly after going live.
Landscape Orientation Designs for iOS and Android using standard tablet sizing.