A light-first streaming app for viewers who asked for readability

Head of Product Design

Design-led, with cross-functional partners. Hamburg / Berlin

Dark mode is the streaming industry's near-universal default, and it has good reasons. A concept survey told us Bibel TV's users wanted brightness and readability instead. As product manager, product owner and Head of Product Design, I turned the redesign toward light.

A survey turned the redesign from dark to light

The setting
Bibel TV, a German broadcaster moving from linear TV to streaming, with apps on iOS, Android, web and connected TV. The redesign brings the app in line with the new on-air brand.
My part
Head of Product Design, and product manager and product owner for the redesign, which is the purpose of my contract. I ran the competitive analysis, set the direction and prototyped in real code.
What changed
Shown the new design in dark mode, respondents to a February 2026 concept survey called it too gloomy and uninviting and asked for brightness and readability. The dark concept became a light-first redesign. The app redesign itself is in active development; engineering builds from working prototype code. Release 6.0 is in beta on Android.
Three takeaways
Check who a default was made for before you copy it. Test the concept while it can still be dropped. Read imperfect research for its direction, and say what it can't carry.

The wall of streaming apps was black from edge to edge

The competitive analysis started as screenshots: Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, ARD, ZDF, WOW, Joyn, Pluto and the rest. Every one sat on a black or near-black background, whatever the system setting. Of the streaming apps analyzed, only YouTube offered light and dark.

A wall of streaming-app screens (WOW, Joyn, ZDF, Disney+, Pluto TV and others), every one on a black or near-black background.
Fig. 01

From the competitive analysis: near-black backgrounds regardless of the system setting. Of the streaming apps analyzed, only YouTube offered light and dark.

Four dark Mediathek concept screens, each with a hero card tinted from its own artwork: green, slate, gray and sand.
Fig. 02

Where we started: the October 2025 Mediathek concept, dark like the rest of the industry. The survey moved it to light.

A grid of mindfulness and meditation app screens: calm photography, warm gradients, sparse layouts.
Fig. 03

The analysis looked past streaming too, at mindfulness and Bible apps such as Calm, Headspace, Hallow and YouVersion.

The default has a reason. A near-black frame recedes, so artwork and video carry the screen. Our first concepts followed it: in October 2025, the Mediathek, the streaming part of the app, was planned consistently dark.

The analysis also looked past streaming, at mindfulness and Bible apps such as Calm, Headspace, Hallow and YouVersion.

An industry default is a decision someone else made

When every competitor ships the same answer, it stops being anyone's choice and becomes an assumption. Dark-first is a good assumption for most streaming.

The useful question is whether your users are the people it was made for. Copying the default skips that question.

Light had to win against a convention with real reasons behind it

Research turned up something specific: users associate Bibel TV with hope, and expected the interface itself to show it. That ran against the industry standard of dark mode, which lets the content shine. We had to take it seriously anyway.

Four phone screens of the redesigned Bibel TV Home, October 2025 concepts: a warm light 'Guten Morgen' screen beside its dark 'Guten Abend' counterpart, then the verse-of-the-day card in light and in dark.

The app had always supported light and dark; the old version switched to dark from 7 in the evening to 5 in the morning by default. So the open question was never whether light mode works. It was which mode leads the design.

The concept survey in February 2026 moved it

Over five days in February 2026, 264 existing app users watched two videos: today's app in light mode and the new design in dark mode. Shown the dark version, respondents called it too gloomy and uninviting; the core need they named was brightness and readability, the older ones citing eye strain. They also assumed the new design had no light mode. It supports both.

So the dark Mediathek concept became a light-first redesign. The real bet was light mode as the primary direction, against the streaming-industry default of dark.

The survey had limits, and I read it with them. About four in ten answers were problematic, leaving a cleaned base of roughly 152, and the comparison of three color variants couldn't be evaluated. I took it as a direction, not a verdict.

Going light reopened the color system underneath

The new branding colors the interface from each artwork, and image-based color themes like these are built dark-first across the industry. Making the same system hold a premium, on-brand feel in light mode was unsolved going in. The light design holds only because it depends on the color engine and the token system that keep it consistent and correct, so each became its own project.

  1. The direction, by hand

    I kept the analysis and the design direction as manual work, in screenshots and Figma explorations. The direction had to be my own judgment, in line with the new on-air brand and with where the market is.

  2. Then real code, with real data

    Once the direction was set, I prototyped the interfaces in Claude Code with real data, first for the web, then as an Android app in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, because Android is the largest part of Bibel TV's userbase. Custom APIs supplied data the production API didn't carry yet.

  3. Feedback on a running app

    User and stakeholder sessions ran on the working prototype instead of a presentation. They surfaced issues and edge cases we would not have found in Figma alone, before implementation.

The one number so far belongs to a feature, not the redesign

The app already carries an AI feature for finding Bible passages, and we redesigned its entry point once before 6.0: suggestion swatches that explain what it is for, and a button restyled as an input field.

Paired bars for the redesigned AI feature, not the app redesign. Weekly starts on iOS went from 205 to 518 (+153%); on Android from 655 to 1,213 (+85%), each an average of the four full weeks before and after its own release (GA4). View full size ↗
Fig. 05

Weekly starts of the redesigned AI feature, before and after its own release. A feature metric, not a redesign outcome.

Weekly starts went from 205 to 518 on iOS (+153%) and from 655 to 1,213 on Android (+85%), each an average of the four full weeks before and after its own release, measured in GA4. That is a feature metric. The redesign will be measured on its own.

In the 6.0 beta, every page takes its color from the artwork

In the 6.0 release build, Home and the series and episode pages are redesigned. Their page gradients are image-based, computed by the image color API from each artwork. One artwork gives a light theme and a dark one: The Chosen's series page is peach in light mode and deep green in dark.

Four Home screens. Light pair: version 5.12 with blue text, a verse of the day, a gradient AI button and thumbnail rails, then 6.0 with a full-width hero and a page tinted aqua from it. Dark pair: the same two apps in dark mode.
Fig. 06

Home, before and after. Light on the left, dark on the right; in each pair, the current 5.x app, then the 6.0 release build. Both versions support light and dark.

Six captures of the 6.0 Home, one per hero in the carousel. The page background, card and logo asterisk change color with each hero: beige, peach, slate blue, two light blues and aqua, all light.
Fig. 07

Light, but not one color: the 6.0 Home takes its page tint from each hero's artwork. Six heroes, six themes.

The Chosen's series page in four screens. Version 5.12 shows a plain episode list in light and dark. Version 6.0 shows header artwork, a play button, tabs and episodes on a page tinted peach in light mode and deep green in dark.
Fig. 08

The same series page, before and after. In 6.0 the page takes its tint from the artwork, peach in light mode and deep green in dark, where 5.x showed a plain list.

An episode page of The Chosen in four screens. Version 5.12: player, metadata and description in light and dark. Version 6.0: a header image, a play button, a tinted page and a Bible verses section.
Fig. 09

An episode page, before and after. 6.0 adds the episode's Bible verses next to the description.

Episode pages now show the episode's Bible verses next to the description. Release 6.0 is in beta, so the redesign's own numbers are still to come.

The 30-second spot

Watch · 30s An internal draft spot for the redesigned app, 30 seconds. It is a draft, not a released campaign.

Dark mode stayed. It stopped leading.

Both the old app and the 6.0 build support light and dark. The same artwork that tints The Chosen's page peach in light mode tints it deep green in dark.

What changed is which mode leads. Bibel TV's users asked for brightness, and in 6.0 it comes first.

How to test a default before you keep it

  1. Check who a default was made for before you copy it.

    Write down the audience the convention serves, then compare it with yours. Here, a streaming norm built for immersion met users who wanted brightness and readability.

  2. Test the concept while it can still be dropped.

    Put the version you'd least like to lose in front of users. Ours was shown in dark mode, and the answers moved it.

  3. Read imperfect research for its direction, and say what it can't carry.

    Name the parts that don't hold before you act on the part that does. Four in ten answers here were problematic and one comparison couldn't be evaluated; the core need still showed.

Immersive, late-night viewing is where the dark default earns its place

Where immersion is the product, the dark default is doing its job: films in a dim room, viewing at night. Fighting it there would cost the experience.

And a light-first bet needs research behind it. Without a survey, you aren't making a bet; you're making a guess with better fonts.

Want to hear more?

  • The conversation I'd start with is the default your product inherited without anyone choosing it: a mode, a layout, a flow. I can show you how this survey was set up, what it could and couldn't tell us, and how one finding about brightness turned a redesign around.
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