The next user-centered TV remote control is your smartphone
Introducing RemoteThink™.
81% use a smartphone and television simultaneously*
The idea is not new. Using your smartphone as a TV remote control is today possible and already offered by many companies. The ubiquity of Wi-Fi and the potential of mobile devices make the traditional physical remotes an artefact that we already want to be behind us.
- They are too many in our living room ;
- They have always more buttons as new TV features appear ;
- They get lost into the fridge.
So the real question is: why is the pretty promising solution of a remote app still not universal? It seems like it’s all about a problem of user-centered TV experience. The following article exhibits and summarizes the thoughts, researches and proposals which have been involved in the conception of RemoteThink, a conceptual interface using your smartphone to control your TV. You can find screenshots of the final project and the whole case study on Behance : https://www.behance.net/gallery/17910799/RemoteThink
Why the current remote control has a failing UX?
With few knowledge about Gestalt principles like Hick, Fitts and Miller’s laws, it sounds obvious that the remote control as we know it today fails in its ergonomics: with an average between 40 and 60 buttons* — whereas we only use about 5 of them (volume + and -, channel + and -, on/off), the interface gets cluttered, our brain struggles to shape it with significance when it doesn’t know it, we take more time to hit our target because of the restricted size and distance between them. We are also forced to memorize arbitrary numerical combinations that aren’t explicit enough and subject us to an extra cognitive effort just when we are aspiring to relax on the couch. That was ok at the beginning of television, when we had less than 10 channels, but of course that’s not the case anymore. And it seems like the remote control hasn’t changed so much since, except by getting worse. The TV remote from the 80s still looks pretty like the one we have today at home, with those big fat rubber toy buttons to press that should not belong to 2014 and our touch scrolling screen era. Couldn’t we already laugh in front of a delightful Kids react to remote control Youtube video?
The remote control is not only out-of-date and uncomfortable. It’s above all non-intuitive. Justin Garrity, ex-creative director at Design Lab, mentions in his blog a problem he encountered at the time he was a young father and called on a baby-sitter. He recalls:
« We (the parents) were feeling better about the situation and on the way out the door I explained (to the baby-sitter) that the TV was set up for them to watch the Jungle Book on the DVD player. I showed her how to control volume on the one remote and the power for the TV on the other. She asked me if she could watch TV after my son went down to bed. I said it was OK and showed her how to switch from the DVD over to the TiVo. What followed was 15 to 20 minutes of teaching her how to use the remotes. When we returned home that evening, the babysitter was sitting on the couch reading a book. She said she tried but she couldn’t get the TV to work right. »
This anecdote illustrates perfectly the real problem of the TV remote control: they are all so different and they control so many different devices that nobody has the same at home, and nobody knows how to use the one from one another. Did anyone ever find at a friend’s place the exact same TV set as the one he owns — same television, same TV remote, same DVD player, etc. ? Steve Jobs referred to the Tower of Babel when talking about the current situation of television: each company wants to win the fight for the living-room with its own technology instead of reaching an agreement all together on a future of TV that serves the user first.
If the remote control is definitely not user-centered, we must wonder how it could it be. With less buttons? No buttons? One universal remote? Several tailor-made remotes for each one of us? Another new remote? Or can’t we just use something we already have in our hand while watching TV?
A smartphone is not a remote control.
Although both of them present an interface on which you can interact, there is still a huge difference in the interactions involved with a smartphone and with a remote control : the remote presents a physical interface whereas the smartphone presents a graphic interface. Beyond the problem of haptic feedback to quote only the best known example, it goes without saying that you definitely can’t just transpose the traditional remote control interface by applying skeuomorphic switches and knobs. You need to be able to easily focus on the screen of your TV without getting a dislocated neck by constantly switching your look between the TV and your smartphone to find where is the volume control each time you want to lower it. This is what most of existing remote apps have come up with though.
So how can we solve this issue? The solution I came up with RemoteThink suggests a gesture-based interface where interactions are made easy, that you don’t need to look at your phone to control it: swipe up and down wherever on the screen to adjust the sound, left and right to channel hop. Tap to pause/ play.
Recommendation system.
Apple TV, Fire TV, Android TV, Roku, TiVo… Most of the set-top boxes on the market include a typical interface based on a library system that you need to browse to find your content. With all that navigation, TV experience is getting closer and closer to what most of them has achieved to do on the web. And it seems legit, they would be wrong to not try to reiterate a successful strategy. For sure there is room for inventive new applications that harness the big screen, and it’s always good to try to break people’s habits, but if we get back to the context of mainstream and linear TV experience for a moment, we will soon realize that the entry point is people lazing on the couch. Indeed, after a long workday, we’re just not in the mood to browse for what we will watch tonight among a list of ten thousand shows, series, games and movies. We just want to take off our shoes, lay down on the couch and relax.
From that, what can technology offer to users to avoid the inevitable browsing step — since the first channel appearing when the TV screen switches on corresponds to the last channel that was on screen when it switches off, even though that first channel is not the one I want to watch now?
The simplest idea I found is a recommendation system based on our habits. A simple algorithm that takes over your brain and makes your choice by finding the right match at the right time. The more you use it, the more it knows what you are used to watch at a given hour and fulfill your expectations. The goal is to launch your favorite program right on your screen as soon as it switches on. And if you’re not convinced by the first program RemoteThink launched for you, you still have ten more extras on the go. Swipe right to see them all.
You know exactly what you are looking for? Pinch the screen to get instant access to all your channels gathered in a tidy mosaic that you can rearrange and custom at your convenience. Simply click on the logo and your program will be on.
Every pixel counts.
On average, the distance between the viewer and the TV is about 8 times the height of the screen. That is pretty far away, at least enough to wonder why we would strain our eyes to read such a dense and precise content as an EPG — Eletronic Program Guide — on our TV whereas our smartphone is right in front of us?
RemoteThink aims to keep only the best on TV. That means the content. We don’t want to get distracted while watching our favorite program. Our screen needs to remain free from any superfluous menu, TV guide, social button or anything that needs usto click on it. What we just need is our video, that’s why we can remove all the rest and get it straight back to our smartphone. That we can now make the most of every pixel of our widescreen TV and enjoy a whole new second-screen TV experience.
Tightening up the grid.
Let’s come back to the EPG. This one can’t get off lightly, because it does generate frustration to users. As I said, EPG are often presented as huge grids. So huge that you cannot even see the end and cannot explore all the possibilities whereas broadcasters really want you to see everything they are offering you. And that sucks. That sucks because we all want to know everything about programs from all sides, don’t we? No, we don’t.
We don’t need to scroll infinitely in a vast space-time to find what is on TV tomorrow and next week on every existing channel in the world. TV needs to be broached in its immediacy. We don’t ask ourselves about “What is on TV right now?” but “What am I going to watch right now?”. Indeed, users only look for programs that might interest them. They settle upon the first program that seems interesting enough to them. Once they chose to watch this program, they stop browsing and above all they don’t wonder if a better program, or a program likely to interest them even more is aired at the same time on another channel. Therefore, to approach the EPG from this angle allows us to downsize it to make it clearer. For example, RemoteThink has a single-column grid that fills the whole mobile screen. You can find programs per channels, hours or keywords. The bias here is that finally you don’t have a global view of every program on all channels for a full week in its entirety.
Within easy reach.
Another issue among the many ones that are involved in the conversion of smartphones as TV remote controls — issues that make this project captivating and that haven’t been taken on board by the existing applications so far — is that if the future of TV remotes is an app, it will not be as accessible as the current one that sits on our coffee tables. Actually, it is not that comfortable to control your TV with your smartphone if you need to unlock it first, then find the app on your springboard, launch the app, and finally interact. We need to minimize those steps.
The answer I figured out is to simply give access to the main features — zapping and adjusting the volume — of RemoteThink straight from the lockscreen of your phone when the app is running. It’s that simple. And it’s way more convenient! Little big details count.
If you wish to read more about RemoteThink project and my research, I made the following PDF available on Dropbox (60 pages, in French). https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65260424/remotethink-recherche.pdf
Feel free to email me for more information: contact[at]mathieuboulet.com
Don’t let the remote control you
RemoteThink is a concept app. Nothing has been developed yet. It’s a personal project I’ve considered for a future friendly TV experience. See the whole case study on Behance: https://www.behance.net/gallery/17910799/RemoteThink
See it in action on Vimeo:
