Your media, your server, your rules

A solo developer reached out for design feedback on a media server they were building. The interface was pure Material Design applied without adaptation, every screen had different layout logic, navigation was unpredictable. These are the normal result of a technical founder focusing on what the product does rather than how it feels to use.

What made this different was the feedback loop. The founder started implementing changes during our sessions, while I was still explaining the rationale. A layout restructured within minutes of being discussed. The first "call" was supposed to be a one-hour audit but it ran to three, and neither of us noticed. The engagement turned into a weekly consulting cadence that has continued for four years, with every interface decision treated as a collaborative discussion rather than a design handoff.

Plex had been the standard for self-hosted media until their interface shifted to prioritise their own content and subscriptions over the user's library. Netflix created the opposite problem, your favourite movie is only there until the licensing deal expires. Physical media is declining and the cultural assumption is shifting toward renting everything forever without ownership.

The thesis was precise: make owning your digital media as easy as using a streaming service. The constraint was not technical but rather experiential. The interface had to feel as polished as Netflix while giving users complete control over their library.

The original interface had no design system. Every view used Material components in their default state without adaptation to the product's specific needs. The fix could not be cosmetic, adding a visual skin over broken interaction patterns would not solve the problem. The decision was to rebuild the entire front end around a consistent set of components and navigation principles spanning the server interface, the web app, and mobile clients.

The central design tension was audience. The developer was building for people like themselves, power users comfortable with servers and terminals; my position was that a self-hosted product competing with Plex cannot afford to require technical expertise. Our benchmark was a relative with no server experience: if they could get from download to a playing movie without phoning anyone, it shipped. That set everything else. Installation had to be three steps that never show a terminal. The player had to match Netflix's production quality while staying fully self-hosted. Sharing had to work from a link, with no account required. None of it was planned on a roadmap; over four years the feature set emerged from the rhythm of weekly discussions, the same rhythm that once restructured a layout mid-sentence.

NoMercy.tv ships with a persistent header, a sidebar that hides on demand, and a central content card as the primary work surface. This pattern now dominates the internet, but when we built it for this product it was not a trend (yet), it was a pattern I had been refining since 2017, when I noticed navigation inconsistencies accumulating across screens in agency projects. The fix was to separate navigation from content into two workspaces, the navigation shell designed once and locked, the content area remaining the daily workspace for designers.

Years later, Spotify ran an A/B test with a nearly identical layout. It lasted two weeks before they reverted it. I kept the pattern anyway; it had solved a structural problem once. Two years after that, Spotify reintroduced it as their permanent design language, right the first time; the organisation just was not ready for it yet. For NoMercy.tv, the triad locked consistency across server interface, web app, and multiple desktop and mobile clients. A user moving between platforms does not have to relearn where things are.