Gaia — World Class OTT & App Experience

Setup

Gaia had the library and the audience: thousands of original films, series and yoga classes, and members who care about what they watch. The apps didn’t match. On tablets it looked like a box-art catalog. Every platform felt like a separate product, and nothing remembered where you left off. Cainkade was brought in to give Gaia a tablet and mobile experience on the level of its films, across iPad, Android tablets, NOOK, Kindle Fire and phone.

What I Led

I led product and experience design from strategy through handoff. I set a cinematic dark direction where imagery leads and one color spectrum carries the brand. I built a shared design system and adjusted it for each platform’s type scale, navigation and input. On the product side I focused on the moments that keep people practicing:

• onboarding that asks what members care about before showing them anything;
• series pages that put context and Resume in one place;
• filters that read like intent;
• downloads that work offline without the member having to think about it.

I worked with engineering on authentication, cross-device pause and playback history, and analytics, so a session started on the TV picks up on the iPad.

What We Delivered

Gaia now feels like one product on every screen: one sign-in, one watch history, and a Home that reflects each member from the first session. The apps reached more than 2 million downloads and over 500,000 paid subscribers, streaming in 185 countries.