Joyn — Case study

Germany’s Streaming Champion

Designing Germany’s streaming challenger with bold simplicity and cinematic calm.

Before streaming, television was simple. You had a few channels. You could sit back, relax and trust the evening to unfold without effort. That was the lean-back experience: passive, curated, comforting.

Then came streaming platforms, and with them, choice.

Suddenly, watching something meant deciding what to watch. Search, scroll, preview, overthink. What began as freedom became friction. Choice demands leaning forward, and too much choice creates a fatigue no pause button can fix.

At Joyn, we saw an opportunity. We couldn’t compete with Netflix and Prime Video on volume of content, but we believed we could outmatch them on experience.

Our goal: recreate the lean-back experience, digitally.

A streaming platform that feels as effortless and curated as TV once did, but modern, immersive and personal. That belief led to three core design directions.

Three design directions

Direction 01

Simplicity: make everything instantly understandable

• Only four primary menu items

• Clear hierarchy, no hidden layers

• Users land in content, not menus

• No second-guessing, no dead ends

The UI shouldn’t require instruction. It should feel like it already knows what you want.

Direction 02

The pyramid: structure that guides, not overwhelms

• A top-down content structure with just a few bold choices at first

• Progressive disclosure as you scroll deeper

• Genre hubs and thematic surfacing to reduce FOMO and overload

It’s not about showing everything. It’s about showing the right thing at the right time, and then stepping back.

Direction 03

Cinematic discovery: let the screen feel like the story

• Full-screen visuals

• Scroll-first exploration, not tabbed navigation

• Smooth transitions

The interface becomes invisible, like the frame of a good film. You’re not navigating a product; you’re already watching.

A live testing lab

To learn how best to recreate the lean-back experience, we built our design process around real-world behavior. We set up a live testing lab on our broadcasting partner’s campus and put evolving prototypes in front of real users every day. This allowed us to:

Validate menu hierarchy and language early

Observe scroll behavior and content recognition

Optimize for passive browsing as well as active search

Test what “calm” actually felt like in motion and layout

We combined daily qualitative insight with weekly iterative sprints, always optimizing for clarity, trust and flow. Testing with real users every day let us distill the experience we ended up launching.

What made Joyn’s experience truly cohesive wasn’t just a design vision. It was a shared commitment across design, product and engineering to build with the same principles.