APPTUI · 2012 to 2015

Adaptive interfaces before their time

Context and stakes

APPTUI built remote controls that reconfigured themselves for whatever app or device you connected to.

An APPTUI phone remote showing a purpose-built Netflix control surface, with play, pause, skip, and volume controls plus trackpad and scroll modes, in front of a laptop playing a Netflix film. — The Netflix control surface: playback, scrubbing, and volume rebuilt as a phone remote, driving a film on the laptop behind it. It had to render well across the fragmented device landscape of early mobile and respond fast enough to feel like a physical remote.

My role

I led the design team. Our method was a systematic teardown of each host application: map what it exposed, find what was missing, then design a purpose built control surface for it.

The teardown ran the same way every time, and that was the point. Whatever the host app exposed became the raw material, and whatever it hid became the design problem. A colour palette remote for Photoshop and timeline scrubbing for Netflix were not separate projects so much as the same method pointed at different surfaces.

We solved the design and the engineering. We never solved distribution.

Outcomes and open threads

The work was credible enough to bring Rogers and TV manufacturers including Vizio to the table.