Designed for 10M+ customers —
and every bar showing the game.

The Problem

Imagine watching Game 7 of the World Series. The game is tied. The bases are loaded, it's the top of the 9th inning, and only one team will win it all. Then your TV screen starts to glitch — and comes to a halt. Error 771. The dreaded outage screen that overtakes the display when satellite signal is lost. For a residential viewer, it's frustrating. For a sports bar packed with people, it's a liability.

Customers had almost no good options before SignalSaver existed — switch to a degraded SD feed, work through a complicated troubleshooting flow, or simply wait. None of those are acceptable answers when the bases are loaded.

The scale: roughly 821 support calls per month, 41,000 truck dispatches per year, and around $680,000 in monthly service credits just to retain customers after failures. The infrastructure for internet fallback existed. What had never been designed was the experience of it.

My Role

This was a one-designer project. I owned everything the user saw — and a lot they didn't. The screens, the behavioral logic underneath them, the edge case documentation, the cross-functional conversations that kept design and engineering from building two different products.

I couldn't design the switching experience in isolation from the people building the switching logic. So I didn't. Daily syncs with product and engineering weren't a formality — they were how the work got made.

I was supported by a UX lead, UI lead, lead content designer, lead researcher, and our UX directors.

The Commercial Problem

The people responsible for fixing a TV at a restaurant or bar during a signal outage aren't IT professionals. They're waiters and bartenders — often in the middle of the busiest shift of the year. We conducted field studies to understand what their setups actually looked like.

What we found was a wide range of realities. Some establishments knew exactly where their remotes were. Others had no idea. Some had the DIRECTV tablet app to control all TVs centrally. Many didn't. During the Super Bowl, when every seat is filled and every screen matters, there is no spare person to troubleshoot.

The venue size problem added another layer. A large sports bar might have 50 or more TVs. Switching all of them to streaming simultaneously would strain their WiFi and our infrastructure. We worked with engineering to build a randomized staggered rollout so TVs connected in sequence rather than all at once. A small technical decision with a large real-world impact.

Turning Opt-In Fatigue Into a Standing Invitation

Our first prototypes asked for consent every time signal degraded. In testing, it felt like being asked to solve a problem you didn't create, at the exact moment you least wanted to think about it.

The insight: the right moment for consent isn't during a crisis. It's before one. We introduced a persistent 'connect automatically' setting that let users pre-authorize protection during calm conditions. One decision. Permanent coverage. In February 2026 alone, 1.2 million out of 2.3 million customers who experienced an outage had already opted in before the storm hit.

Saying Something Without Saying Too Much

Users had a right to know when their feed source changed. But no matter how we framed it, the moment a modal appeared, people felt like something was wrong. The messenger was becoming the message.

Early versions tried to give users full control. Opt in to always connect. Opt in just this once. Watch in SD. Tune to another channel. Dismiss entirely. In theory, options feel respectful. In practice, five choices during a signal outage felt like handing someone a car manual while their engine is on fire.

We also over-explained the cost. Early screens flagged that internet fees may apply — technically true, but tone-deaf. These customers were already paying for internet. They weren't downloading movies. They were watching the game. The warning created hesitation where there should have been none.

The real breakthrough was a framing shift. We had been leading with the problem. Testing kept telling us to lead with the solution. SignalSaver isn't a workaround. It's a feature. Free, automatic protection powered by technology you already own. Once we started saying that, people stopped hesitating.

Working with content design, we stripped everything down to its quietest honest form. Present long enough to register. Gone before it became noise. There is real craft in an acknowledgment that doesn't spiral into alarm.

The Overtime Problem

Engineering's instinct was to restore satellite the moment signal stability returned. Every extra minute on streaming is a cost. Reasonable position. Wrong answer.

If signal comes back at the 88th minute of a match, you don't switch. You wait. Interrupting a room full of people at peak emotional intensity — penalty kick, bases loaded, fourth quarter, game tied — is also a cost. It just doesn't appear on a balance sheet.

We built timing logic that accounted for live sports context, overtime scenarios, and the simple human reality that some moments are sacred. The rule we landed on was simple: we do nothing until the program you are currently watching is over.

In partnership with engineering, product, and scheduling, we built a system that checked every two minutes during a live sports event to determine whether the game was heading into overtime. If it was, the system kept checking. It didn't stop until the game ended and a program boundary was confirmed. Only then — when the credits were rolling and the room had exhaled — did we consider it safe to switch back to satellite.

The best product decision we made here wasn't a design. It was knowing when to do nothing.

Every Edge Case Had an Answer

Rather than treating failure states as isolated footnotes, I worked with engineering to map every possible failure into one coherent system. Blackout restrictions. Program licensing limits. Buffering states. Internet failure during fallback. Low-resolution alternate feeds.

Each state had a defined behavior, a clear message, and a recovery path. At national scale, there was no such thing as a minor edge case. Clarity at the edges is what earns trust in the middle.

What Failed

No solution ships complete. Parts of what I believed would make SignalSaver truly great for commercial customers were out of scope, and I still think about them.

The biggest gap was the tablet experience. DIRECTV has a tablet app that lets bar and restaurant operators control all of their TVs from one place. If we had been able to integrate SignalSaver into that app, a bartender could have switched every screen in the building without leaving the bar. No hunting for remotes. No interrupting service. No hoping someone remembered where the receiver was.

We couldn't build that in time. What we could do was onboard establishments properly — educating them about the feature as we rolled out new H26K cable boxes. It helped. But it wasn't the same as putting the control directly in their hands during the moments that mattered most.

If I could go back, that's where I'd push harder.

What I Learned

The most important design decisions on this project weren't screens. They were timing.

When to switch. When to say something. When to revert. When to wait. Every one of those decisions carried more weight than any visual treatment. I came into this project thinking about interfaces. I left thinking about systems — and about the moments between states that no one ever designs for.

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