Tandem Mobile App

Tandem (originally released as "Spring") is a powerful companion app for use with Hisense VIDAA Smart TVs. It was the first to feature many innovations including content awareness and two way communication.

My Role

Manager of Product Design, Product Lead, Interaction Design Contributor

The Challenge

The Goal

All Smart TV companion apps at the time were nothing more than glorified remote controls. We needed to create a companion app worthy of the VIDAA brand. It needed to provide innovations and capabilities not available elsewhere. Most importantly it needed to enhance the viewing experience.

Design and build a revolutionary Companion App that enhanced the viewing experience and increased TV watch time on VIDAA Smart TVs.

The Beginning

Upon researching the other major industry offerings (at the time), it became clear that their main purpose was to act as a secondary remote control. I believed that using a smart phone to replace a remote control (that you needed to turn to the TV on in the first place) was a poor value proposition. In order to be useful, the companion app needed to enhance the TV watching experience. To do this we needed to take any metadata or extended information on the TV and make it available on the phone. This meant, that at any time, anyone connected to the TV could get additional information on the content being watched, set bookmarks, take screenshots to share, and more, without disrupting the experience for anyone else.

This would require tight integration with the Smart TV Platform so that we could enable two way communication. For the first time ever, your mobile phone would know what you were watching on TV. In 2014 this was a game changer.

The Design

In order to provide a comprehensive experience, all native applications on the TV needed to be extended on to the companion app.

As per our normal design process, after completing our foundation design, we began to deliver interaction design chapters planned in coordination with the development team.

This allowed visual designers some additional time to finalize the overall look and feel before applying it to the wires.

The Result

The final product delivered a beautiful second screen experience that remains unrivaled to this day. The Tandem App has influenced all subsequent Companion Apps released by Hisense as well as Hisense's many competitors in China.