Shake It!
One gesture from live TV to the right product page. Open the app, shake the phone, land on the PDP. Silver Award at the International Eyes & Ears Awards 2020. +25% conversion uplift in a quarter.
Overview
Built to close the gap between lean-back TV engagement and mobile purchase. Shake It removed the manual search step entirely and contributed to the year HSE's digital revenue grew 19%.
Award & Recognition
Silver Award for Digital Innovation · International Eyes & Ears Awards 2020
View winners page →My direct contribution
Concept, design direction & principles
- Originated the shake gesture concept and directed the core interaction design with the app team's designer: trigger sensitivity, confirmation state, error state (when no live product is detected), and channel-switching logic for HSE's three TV channels
- Set the three design principles (fast, forgiving, obvious) and used them as the decision filter throughout the project
- Directed the onboarding design: it had to work in seconds for customers watching TV in a lean-back context, phone in hand, with no tolerance for complexity
- Guided the resolution of the core design tension: the gesture needed to be sensitive enough to trigger reliably, but not so sensitive it fired accidentally. This took several iterations between design and engineering to calibrate correctly.
Team & collaboration
Cross-discipline coordination
- Coached and mentored the app team's designer throughout the project, providing direction on key decisions while keeping execution in their hands
- Worked closely with the app PM to ensure both conversion goals and user experience quality shaped the brief; also aligned Engineering and the TV commerce team on scope and success criteria
- Managed the dependency between app design and broadcast timing; the feature only works if the live product data syncs correctly with the on-air schedule
- Ensured consistency with the broader app design system
Duration: 2020 · Platform: HSE app (iOS + Android) · Context: Second-screen live TV journey
Impact
- +25% conversion uplift in a quarter
- 4.9/5 app rating on Google Play (currently)
- Silver Award for Digital Innovation · International Eyes & Ears Awards 2020
The Problem
HSE's business model is built on live TV commerce. Customers watch a show, see a product they want, reach for their phone, and then spend the next 60 seconds searching for it in an app that doesn't know what's on TV right now. By the time they find the product, the moment has passed.
The friction wasn't in the checkout. It was in the gap between the TV and the app, the moment when purchase intent is highest and the path to conversion is longest.
The design constraint that shaped everything
The core constraint was context: customers are on the sofa, TV on in the background, phone in hand. This is a lean-back scenario: low effort tolerance, short attention window. Any interaction more complex than a single gesture was the wrong solution.
The shake gesture was the right answer not because it was clever, but because it required exactly one action from the user and produced an unambiguous result. Every alternative we considered (a "live now" button in the navigation, a notification-based approach, a widget) required more steps or more context-switching.
The hardest design problem was what happens when it fails: when the live product can't be detected, or when the user shakes the phone accidentally. Getting the error and confirmation states right, communicating status without interrupting the experience, took as long as designing the success path.
Takeaway
One gesture, one product, zero friction. The best product features don't feel designed; they feel obvious. Shake It won an award and contributed to the year HSE's digital revenue grew 19%.