Designing for the big screen

The curious case of designing a smart TV software

In the world of smart phones and laptops, can we really get away with the big screen? Indeed, TVs are now smart. They can connect to the internet of things, play things for you on voice commands, it’s all there.

And just like a laptop has more precise mouse clicks vs smart phone which has much larger touch areas, television on the other hand needs to be operated by a remote which means they also need to be simplified. Modern remotes for Apple TV or Chromecast with Google TV, for example, come with minimal buttons for navigation; microphone for quick voice search etc. Some are even experimenting with using mobile app as a remote like Google TV.

Let’s get to the structure now, I was the only designer working on this project but thanks to my team helping me plan out user tests and reviewing designs, I was able to put some good solutions forward to our client.

As a business requirement, users could browse episodes from the last 7 days for their favourite shows which was called ‘Catch up TV’. One simple way was to show these episodes as available in the detail pages of such TV shows.

The user could browse between days automatically without changing tab similar to what happens on a long scroll on the web with tabs using indentation.

The date tabs are left to right matching a calendar so that previous tab and moving left would take the user to the ‘previous’ day and NOT the ‘next’ tab.

The filter on top left would open a left window which would allow multi-selection of both genre and language lists similar to dropdown on a website.

The second problem with logins was a more serious because of lack of technical capacity to create login codes and also user base which might not have a laptop. This required at least some market study and the target user before to propose a solution. Even before we started thinking about ways to login to your account — it was typical for many Indian apps at that time to allow users to login using their phone numbers (since not everyone would have an email id especially users who were 35+ etc. or customers in remote locations).Even to subscribe to channels — TataSky users could give a missed call to specific numbers tagged to channels to get them activated. Hence phone was a more important means not only to communicate with the user but also identify them and it had far more penetration than other devices in the target geography of India.

We started by selecting only a few individuals who were a mix of new and existing customers and identified two key user flows — only one step at a time vs full form as part of setting up the device and monthly subscriptions. Despite the fact that first flow meant many clicks but it was more favourable to users (3 out of 5) and also took less time to complete registration (50% less task time).

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