Category Archives: User Experience

Design of an App for Internet-Enabled TVs

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Designing applications for Internet-Enabled TVs is much different than designing for the desktop or mobile web. Here I explain the process we used at ConTV to design LIVO, a video on demand service.



What is LIVO?

LIVO is an application that runs -so far- on Samsung TVs. Users can install the application for free directly from their TV using the Samusng App store. LIVO provides an interface to browse and play video on demand from different partners offering different shows.




Problems

We wanted to design a great application, something easy and fun to use. On the way we found several problems:

  • Distance: you have to test your concepts and designs on a real TV and a few meters away from it.
  • The TV is mostly a passive medium, the app had to start playing video as soon as possible.
  • Usability: managing an app with a remote control is incredibly limiting.
  • Text must be big.
  • A very common problem in many TV apps: navigation. It’s difficult to highlight interface elements to tell users in which part of the app she is.
  • Important trade-offs: usability against beautiful interface.



    • Users

    We decided we had to know more about how people use TVs at home, so we organized interviews with target users. We talked to them and made a lot of questions in order to discover how they choose shows, how they share what they see, their motivations and general behavior around the TV. With all the information we created personas that proved to be extremely valuable during the first part of the design process.



    LIVO TV App Menus and Interface



    The design

    After a strategy session supported by the user research we decided which features this video on demand service should provide to satisfy the target users. These are the mean aspects from the LIVO app:

  • It provides fast access to videos.
  • Easy navigation.
  • Great content.
  • Easy to read text.
  • Simple but with a few additional features.
  • Recommendation engine is transparent to the user.



    • Links

    If you want additional information about LIVO, you can visit the Samsung Smart TV Contest website. Additionally you can find information about the Internet-Enabled TV business on the ConTV website.




    Improving the User Experience (and conversion rate) with Heat Maps

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    Heat maps can show in which part of a website visitors are clicking, they are a color representation of the amount of clicks. Heat maps could be of great help to improve the user experience of an already working website. To show you how, I would like to present an example.



    Understanding the business and users

    Guia Munich is a German website for Spanish speaking tourists visiting Munich, offering personalized guided tours. Although many young people visit the website, the real target are older visitors, people willing to pay an extra for a small and customized tour. These groups of users are apparently not that experienced with computers, websites and using the mouse to point. A heat map gave us some interesting insights to improve the website performance.



    Homepage Heat Map



    Changes on the website

    The colored boxes on the homepage show the tours available in Munich and Bavaria. Thanks to the heat map, we realized that many users were clicking on the images, hoping to get more information about a particular tour. Unfortunately, in the past these pictures were not clickable, only tour titles were (e.g. “Sur de Baviera”.)



    Picture Heat Map



    I believe some users were clicking on images and as nothing was happening they were leaving the website. After making the images clickable the time spent on site was 20% longer, pages per visitor went 10% up and the bounce rate improved 8 percentage points.



    Email Heat Map




    Another issue I discovered was related to the email address. As it can be seen on the heat map, some people were clicking on it; but the email address was not clickable. After making all the email addresses clickable (and together with the previously mentioned changes) the company got 6% more email requests.

    This is just an example on how small changes could make users’ life easier and improve the economic performance of a website.

    Proposal for the New Firefox 4 Home Tab

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    Mozilla Labs is organizing a design challenge to create a new home tab for the upcoming Firefox 4. The new home will be using the users’ history information to produce a better user experience.

    Firefox Home Tab Design Challenge

    I was doing some user research asking people to show me their way of using their web browser and I was specially paying attention to the homepage. These are some of my findings:

    - It is very important to have search functionality in the homepage. Users go there as an starting point to a new search.

    - People like having relevant information in the homepage, like feeds coming from different websites or news coming from a particular source (e.g. Yahoo!).

    - Many users get lost when using tabs. I’ve discovered that many don’t even know what a tab is, the potential of tab browsing is something unknown to many people.

    Based on that I prepared my proposal for the design challenge:

    It would be nice to get your comments!

    Find here more information about the Home Tab Design Challenge.