Shaping the Short-Form Experience: FX Digital Collaborates with Synamedia on GO Shorts

Mobile viewing habits have changed the rules of engagement for video services. Audiences, particularly younger ones, expect discovery to be instant and browsing to feel as natural as scrolling a social feed. Meeting that expectation without asking operators to rebuild their content pipelines from scratch is a hard design problem, and it’s the one we set out to solve alongside Synamedia on GO Shorts.

The challenge

Synamedia chose us as partners to lead the user experience and visual design for GO Shorts, a new AI-powered module within its Go Cloud platform. The concept: take an operator’s existing catalogue and automatically generate a personalised, short-form feed from it, sitting alongside the long-form service operators already run, with no new production workflow required.

For our design team, that meant solving for a few things at once:

• A browsing rhythm suited to short-form content, where discovery has to be immediate
• A visual language built mobile-first, matching how and where this audience actually watches
• A frictionless way to move a viewer from a short clip into the full long-form title, in a single tap

Our approach

We led the UX and visual design work in close collaboration with Synamedia’s product and engineering teams, who took the designs through to a platform-grade implementation, built for the reliability and operational scale operators need in production.

As Matthew Duhig, Co-founder at FX Digital, put it: short-form viewing “demands a different rhythm.” We translated that rhythm into an interface: fast to browse, easy to fall into, and never a dead end, with every short clip acting as a doorway back into the operator’s full catalogue.

Why this matters for operators

GO Shorts gives operators a way to compete for mobile-first attention without standing up a second content pipeline. The module surfaces AI-selected clips based on viewer behaviour, blends in third-party content, and hands viewers seamlessly between short and long-form, all built on infrastructure operators already run through Go Cloud.

FX Digital’s role in the collaboration

GO Shorts is a good example of the kind of project we’re built for: brought in for deep design expertise on a defined piece of a much larger platform, working hand-in-hand with the platform owner’s engineering team rather than in a silo. As Dr Tzvi Gerstl, CEO of Synamedia, explained, the collaboration enables operators to launch distinctive experiences faster by combining platform strength with specialist partners, and that’s the role we look to play on projects like this.

Bringing next-generation experiences to life

Interested in learning how FX Digital can help elevate your streaming app’s user experience?

Get in touch with our team today to discuss your project.

About Synamedia

Synamedia helps many of the world’s leading operators and media companies create, deliver and monetise next-generation video experiences across mobile and big screen. Combining integrated platforms, cloud innovation and trusted operational expertise, Synamedia enables customers to grow audiences, increase engagement, and accelerate digital transformation. Synamedia is headquartered in the UK.