JioCinema · Live sports · Designed 2022, shipped IPL 2023
WatchParty
Watching a match with your friends, popcorn and jerseys included, rebuilt for people who weren't in the same room.
- Role
- Product flow, UX & UI
- Ownership
- JE Solo Designer for WatchParty
- Worked with
- PMs, Jio Meet, JioCinema, Jio Engage dev & ops
- Timeline
- Designed 2022, shipped IPL 2023
The problem
JioCinema had won IPL rights and was streaming it free, expecting an enormous audience. A Teleparty clone wasn't the brief. Leadership wanted something no OTT platform in India had shipped. In India cricket is watched in groups, so WatchParty had to rebuild that room for people who weren't in one. Live calling came from Jio Meet, gamified stickers and reactions from Jio Engage, and all of it had to behave like one product.
Why it was hard
A video call is a distraction by design
People came to watch the match, and the thing being added to the screen is built to pull eyes onto faces. It also meant a tight workspace carrying heavy, live loading elements over a running stream, on phones already handling HD cricket.
Three mental models, without losing familiarity
A video call, a live chat and co-watching each carry learned behaviour. The job was introducing something nobody had used before without breaking the parts people already knew. The party was also capped at eight by Jio Meet's feasibility check, so everything had to work inside that.
The design system covered calling, not celebration
Jio Meet already existed, so calling components were there. What the system had no vocabulary for was the playful layer: sticker trays, sticker fountains, live reactions. Each one had to be built new and argued into an existing library rather than invented beside it.
The call I made
The match never gets covered, and never gets drowned out.
One rule, three expressions. On desktop I gave video, people and controls their own territory in an L layout, so the match lost size but was never covered. In the party menu, media volume and party volume are separate sliders, so your friends and the commentary never fight over one control. On a phone there was not room for both panels at once, so video and chat became a toggle rather than a split. Mobile landscape followed the same rule.
Float the participant tiles over the video and mix everything into one audio stream. It is the pattern nearly every video call and co-watching product reaches for, and it keeps the match full size.
Give video, people and controls their own territory, and give the call its own volume. The match stays whole and everything else works around it. It cost real estate, and secondary features moved down into sub lists.
What shipped
Party started.
The empty state does the inviting. A party of one is the moment most likely to end the session, so it got the most personality.
Chat and reactions.
GIFs, emoji and match clips, because the design system had calling but no vocabulary for celebration.
Attention controls.
Hide self-view exists because your own face is the third thing competing with the match. Pin is personal, spotlight is for the whole room.
How it landed
Shipped for IPL 2023 and carried into JioCinema's entertainment catalogue, becoming a repeatable co-watching format rather than a one tournament feature.
minutes watched
users engaged
average session length
WatchParty on JioCinema, IPL 2023, feature specific. Repeated after the tournament on Big Boss: 58M+ minutes, 5M+ users, 13 minute average session.
The CMS was the part nobody asked for. I built it to configure teams, fixtures and brand stickers, but also show timings, which is why WatchParty moved from IPL to Big Boss with staggered re-airs and no new engineering.
In hindsight
The L layout protected the match by making everything smaller, including the match. It solved the problem by subtraction, when what landscape really needed was presence that doesn't cost screen space at all: spatial audio, ambient reactions, an AR layer where your friends occupy the room instead of a rectangle inside it. That is the version I would want to design now.