Start the new year by running your sprint reviews with zoom and text scaling turned on

Sprint reviews are all about one thing: figuring out whether what we built actually works for real people.

As we kick off the new year, it’s a good time to pause and ask an honest question: are we really seeing our product the way people use it? When we review a TV experience at the default size, we’re usually seeing it under ideal conditions. Everything fits. Nothing is stressed. It’s the most forgiving version of the product, and it’s rarely the one people experience at home.

There’s a small but powerful shift you can make this year: run your sprint reviews with zoom magnification and text scaling enabled, and leave them on.

This isn’t about running a one-off accessibility exercise. Just bump the zoom to 2X or 4X, set the text to large, and review the product like that.

What tends to happen is the room quiets down, attention sharpens, and details that might’ve been brushed off before start to stand out. It’s a simple way to kick off the year with a clearer view of what you’re shipping.

Why zoom and text scaling matter on TV

Zoom magnification and text scaling aren’t edge cases. A lot of people rely on them—people with low vision, older viewers, and anyone sitting farther from the screen than we usually design for.

TV already introduces challenges:

* You’re several feet away from the screen

* Interfaces are dense and visually busy

* Focus, layout, and text all need to hold up as things get bigger

Zoom shows you how the layout behaves under pressure.

Text scaling shows you whether your content still makes sense when words take up more space.

If either of those settings breaks the experience, that’s not user error. It’s feedback from the product.

Sprint review is the right place to see this feedback, because you’re looking at real screens, real flows, and real constraints—not idealized mocks.

What you’ll notice almost immediately

Once zoom or text scaling are on, issues surface fast.

Text that seemed readable suddenly feels crowded. Headings overwhelm the screen. Labels wrap in odd places or push other content out of view. Important information gets cut off, while secondary details quietly disappear.

Layouts that once felt solid start to feel fragile. The user interface doesn’t adapt and horizontal scrolling suddenly appears. Pop-ups overflow and primary actions drift off-screen with no obvious way back.

Focus is often where things really unravel. It becomes harder to track where you are. Focus indicators get clipped or lost, and navigation starts to feel more tiring than intuitive.

These aren’t rare edge cases. They’re everyday usability problems—and you don’t have to hunt for them.

How to do this without making it awkward

You don’t need a new process or a big announcement.

Turn on zoom and/or increase text size before the demo starts. Don’t frame it as a test. Treat it like a perfectly normal way someone might be using your product.

Walk through real tasks: search, sign-in, settings, playback, error states. Zoom and text scaling are especially good at exposing complexity, so resist the urge to stick to only the happiest paths.

As you go, talk about what you’re noticing. If something feels harder to read or navigate, say it out loud. Let the team experience it together, in real time.

When issues come up, capture them like any other product work, because that’s exactly what they are.

The shift this creates

What I love about this practice is how quickly it changes how teams think.

• Designers start considering scale and text size earlier.

• Engineers build layouts that adapt more gracefully.

• Product managers catch problems before users ever do.

Accessibility stops feeling abstract, and no-one has to imagine what a low-vision user *might* experience—it’s right there on the screen, shared by everyone in the room. Starting the year this way sets the tone for smarter, more inclusive decisions in every sprint.

One step to take this year

As you start the new year, try this: run your sprint review with zoom and/or text scaling turned on. Leave them on. Pay attention to what breaks or what suddenly feels harder than it should.

If your product only works when text is small and everything is perfectly sized, it doesn’t really work.

Sprint review is the safest, smartest place to discover that, and the best place to start fresh this year.