Role
Design Director

Company
Com Hem — telecom & entertainment

Team
4-person design team across 6 digital platforms

Focus
Brand, product design, consumer experience and design leadership

Context

Com Hem Play had started as a companion service for TV customers. By 2019, the ambition had changed: it needed to become a standalone subscription product capable of competing in the rapidly growing streaming market.

We had six months to create a distinct brand and consumer experience, redesign the product across six platforms and launch a new purchase journey — while continuing to develop the existing service.

Design was organisationally part of Brand, while UX and product designers worked across cross-functional product teams. My role was to connect brand, product and technology around one coherent experience.

My role

As Design Director for the initiative, I combined design direction, team leadership and hands-on exploration:

• Set the overall brand and product design direction

• Built and led the multidisciplinary design team

• Connected Marketing, Product and Technology around a shared experience vision

• Facilitated strategic discovery and design workshops

• Created early brand and product concepts hands-on

• Coached designers and reviewed execution across platforms

Connecting brand and product

The challenge wasn't simply to redesign an interface. Com Hem Play needed its own position in the market while still retaining enough connection to the parent brand.

I framed the work across three connected layers:

Brand — what the product should stand for
Identity — how that should be expressed
Product — how consumers should experience it

This gave Marketing, Product, Technology and Design a shared framework for making decisions across the transformation.

Brand & Logo Direction

I facilitated an initial workshop with Marketing, Product and leadership to align on positioning, personality and experience principles.

I then worked hands-on exploring different directions for the identity and product expression — using early concepts to make the strategy tangible and give the team something concrete to react to.

We ultimately retained the connection to Com Hem while creating a more distinctive streaming identity around the Play symbol.

Expressive, darker surfaces were used where brand and inspiration mattered most — such as landing pages and campaigns.

Lighter, functional surfaces supported tasks where clarity, accessibility and conversion were more important — such as checkout, account management and content-heavy pages.

This became an important principle for the wider system: brand expression should adapt to the user's intent rather than compete with it.

Building and empowering the team

Once the direction was established, I staffed a multidisciplinary design team covering the full experience:

2 Product Designers — logged-in experience across platforms
1 UX Designer — web, acquisition and purchase journey
1 Visual Designer — brand identity and visual expression

My role shifted between design direction, coaching, facilitation and hands-on support — giving designers ownership while maintaining a coherent experience across the product.

Designing through discovery

Product designers worked closely with Product and Technology to identify the most important problems and explore solutions before committing to delivery.

We established three experience principles to guide decisions:

Smart but human
Inspire and guide
Intuitive and smooth

Teams explored alternatives through design studios, prototypes and continuous user testing, while still delivering improvements to the existing product.

Simplifying the purchase journey

A key challenge was creating a standalone purchase journey without disrupting existing Com Hem customers.

I coached the UX designer leading the work, while Product, Design and Engineering mapped the different customer journeys and tested alternative flows before implementation.

This was deliberately a case where my role was to provide direction and unblock the team rather than design the solution myself.

Scaling one experience across six platforms

In parallel with product development, we created a shared design system to translate the new experience consistently across:

Web · iOS · Android · Apple TV · Samsung Smart TV · Android TV

The goal wasn't pixel-level uniformity. It was to create a coherent product language that could adapt to different interaction models and platform conventions.

The Samsung Smart TV experience became one of the clearest expressions of the new direction.

Impact

Consumer product
Transformed Com Hem Play from a bundled TV companion into a standalone subscription streaming experience.

Brand & experience
Established a distinct identity and coherent product language across six platforms.

Design capability
Built and led a multidisciplinary team and introduced shared principles, discovery practices and a cross-platform design system.

Business
Com Hem Play became Sweden's fastest-growing streaming service by summer 2020.