Designing a seamless Sky Store movie experience

The Sky Store team asked me to help design a complete web experience for their movie rental and purchase service. The platform needed to work smoothly across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, allowing users to browse and stream movies, manage their accounts, and complete transactions without friction.

One of our main challenges was creating responsive design guidelines. At that time, the lines between devices were starting to blur, but user contexts were still very different. Mobile screens were getting larger, tablets smaller, and people used each device in unique ways. To address this, we explored multiple layout options and aspect ratios to design experiences that felt natural and optimized for each device.

Sky Store’s unique offer was that users who bought a movie would also receive a physical DVD in the mail. This small but powerful feature helped drive higher revenue, so it needed to be visible and easy to access at key points across the experience.

Advertising and editorial content were also important parts of the Sky Store experience. To integrate them naturally, we designed flexible layouts that could include responsive banners, themed collections, and curated movie lists selected by the editorial team.

Research showed that using large, immersive visuals—such as full-bleed images or background videos—on movie detail pages helped capture attention and encouraged social sharing. Adding tags for genres and featured talent also improved engagement and helped users discover new films more easily.

The web video player needed to meet specific service requirements while delivering a high-quality experience that could stand alongside leading platforms like Netflix and BBC iPlayer.