Comments on: Designing a touch-screen TV remote control on a smartphone

By: TimS

TimS — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:22:22 +0000

Big advantage of gestures: you can do them without looking at your device’s screen. Tap to play/pause would be a good start.

Perhaps you’d consider some novel EPG designs. Navigating TV EPGs seems very clumsy, by comparison to, say, browsing content on an iPod. That’s partly because iPods make excellent use of scrolling (and have done for the best part of a decade, now), and respond instantly, and maybe partly because you have a better idea what music is on your iPod than what programmes are on an EPG.

An iPad would be a really good form factor for an EPG. (An iPhone-sized smartphone is probably a little small).

A brief discussion just now suggested browsing by length (“I want a 30 minute programme to watch over dinner” vs. “I want a feature film”).

By: Second screen usability « NoTube blog

Second screen usability « NoTube blog — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:57:35 +0000

[...] in early May we blogged about some usability issues associated with using a smartphone app as a TV remote control and ‘companion dev… in one of the NoTube prototypes developed by the BBC. Since then ‘second screen’ apps [...]

By: vickybuser

vickybuser — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:06:19 +0000

Thank you both for your comments.

Karl – the settings have now been changed in WordPress and http://blog.notu.be/feed/ now carries full posts.

Vicky

By: Karl

Karl — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:31:12 +0000

Hello.

1)’Tilt and shakes’ as well as voice commands are nice but there are some inherent costs within (the phone is not normally used as a remote so there is an extra learning curve for the user)

2)Could you enable the “full content” RSS feed, please?
Partial feeds tend to get overlooked.

Karl

By: Mike Atherton

Mike Atherton — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:07:03 +0000

Hi Vicky – good post. My experience of various touch-screen remotes (including the Harmon Kardon Take Control and the Logitech Harmony) is that they’re unfortunately mostly crap. While the idea of an adaptive remote is interesting, in practice devices have failed because:

- they’ve used resistive touch screens, which aren’t nearly sensitive enough. Perhaps the iphone’s capacitative screen will aid this issue

- in order to be usable, the button sizes have to be far larger than on a physical remote. This leads to real-estate issues.

- and as you mention, the lack of haptic feedback make them impossible to use without looking at the screen constantly. I imagine this would be worse on a non-dedicated device (like the iphone) where it would be all too easy to quit the remote app.

And as you mention in your other point, web-enhanced TV certainly doesn’t have to mean web on a TV screen. In the bad old days of OpenTV/Liberate apps (hmm – are we still there?) it was briefly popular in the US to create somewhat synchronised websites that extended a programme-brand and offered in-programme interactivity (such as answering quiz questions) in a way that overcame the backchannel limitations of the time. Reference point here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Screen_Solutions

Personally I’d love to see some kind of synchronised smart programme extension on my iphone – real-time tweets, IMDB trivia, Test The Nation style interactivity – far more than I’d want to use the phone to control the TV itself.