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ZDF .de

ZDF relaunched its streaming portal zdf.de on 18 March 2025, and I worked on it from my first day at the agency. In a flat team of more than 20, I worked across the whole app: components and design system, player, Core Web Vitals, accessibility. Two weeks before go-live, I also built a component nobody had planned for.

All work

Client
ZDF
Year
2025
Role
Frontend development · AI setup
In the vita: 2023
The new zdf.de start page with large teasers for current shows.

01 · The brief

zdf.de is ZDF's main platform for streaming, and the 2025 relaunch was its first big step since 2016. JAKALA, then still FFW, built the new frontend: Next.js with the App Router, Linaria for zero-runtime CSS, GraphQL, all in one monorepo linted with oxlint and formatted with oxfmt. I joined in December 2023 and stayed through go-live and beyond.

  • 02 · My part

    The team was flat: more than 20 people, and in the frontend everyone worked at senior level, title or not. I had a hand in almost every part of the app. Most of my time went into four areas: the component library and design system, the video player and its interface, Core Web Vitals, and accessibility.

  • The zdf.de video player, paused in the heute-show intro, with its controls: timeline, ten seconds back and forward, subtitles and settings.
    zdf.de, live since 18 March 2025.

  • 03 · Two weeks before launch

    At most two weeks before go-live, a gap turned up. The shows page needed a genre bar: 16 categories from "Alle Inhalte" to "Politik", scrolling sideways, and compliant with BITV, the accessibility standard German public bodies must meet. Concept and design had missed it, and the launch depended on it. I asked for three story points and took it on alone, from concept and design to development, accessibility and tests.

The genre bar on zdf.de/shows: "Alle Inhalte" is selected and underlined in orange, followed by Unterhaltung, Satire, Comedy, Kochen, Musik, Kultur, Sport and more genres running past the right edge.
  • Key message

    Give me three points, and I'll cook something up. [PLACEHOLDER: confirm the exact words]

  • 04 · The hard parts

    A row of tabs is simple until it scrolls. I built the bar as an ARIA tablist with tab panels, so the arrow keys move between genres. The hard part was keeping scroll and focus in step: when focus lands on a tab outside the visible area, the bar has to bring it into view. Screen readers had to announce the right genre at the right moment. I covered it with unit tests, Playwright and axe; at the time, AI suggested a few lines at most.

  • 05 · AI in the team

    I also brought AI agents into the team. In the ZDF monorepo I built almost the whole setup myself: agent rules, skills and commands, custom agents, MCP servers and hooks. Every developer in the monorepo works with it, fewer than ten people across several ZDF products.

06 · Outcome

zdf.de went live on 18 March 2025, with the genre bar on board. It is still part of the site today. For me the lesson was that scope shows in moments like that one: nobody owned the gap, so I took it.