Whakaata Māori

Led UX design work for MĀORI+, the streaming service for Whakaata Māori, during its 2023 to 2024 refresh across CTV, tvOS, mobile, and web.

The Challenge
MĀORI+, originally launched in 2021, was undergoing a significant refresh spanning multiple platforms with different technical constraints and design conventions. The service needed to support bilingual content in Māori and English, custom content badging tied to funding bodies such as NZ On Air, parental controls and a separate kids mode, and consistent playback and navigation behaviour, all while each platform (CTV, tvOS, mobile, web) imposed its own limits on layout, focus handling, and interaction patterns. Reconciling a single design intent across those platform differences, without introducing inconsistency or unsupported functionality on any one of them, was the core design problem across the review cycle.

The Work
Took part in a series of structured UX review sessions with Whakaata Māori stakeholders and Accedo engineering and design colleagues, covering:

• Out-of-the-box UI across homepage, showpage, player, EPG, mini-EPG, search, and settings, including parental ratings metadata placement, custom badging sourcing, episode sort and filter controls, and platform-specific handling of hero rail item counts and trailer support (tvOS in particular required separate treatment given its more limited navigation model).

• Settings and account management flows, including surfacing sign-in in the top navigation per platform, restructuring the mobile settings entry point, and defining kids-mode PIN behaviour for both anonymous and signed-in users, including forgot-PIN and password-reset paths.

• Live and EPG-related flows, including next-programme timing display and fallback messaging when schedule data isn't available.

The refreshed service launched across Aotearoa on iOS, Android, Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and web in April 2024, and won the OTT Platform, New Zealand award at the Asia Pacific Broadcasting Awards in May 2024.