Designing for Television

A three-part series on designing and prototyping for TVs and gamepads

Compared to other platforms, designing UIs for television is a relatively young area. TV is also a fundamentally different platform than web or mobile, and requires a unique set of considerations, including screen size and distance, technical constraints, and context of use.

In this three-part series, we dig into the why and how of designing a usable TV interface and provide some tools to get you prototyping your own designs right away.

Part 1

An introduction to the basic ingredients of a TV UI

To start, we discus strategies and principles to guide the design of a usable TV interface, from type and color to the interaction of gamepad controllers and UI.

Part 2

Prototyping the user interface

Here, we give you a high-level overview of the core functions of our TV prototype so that you’ll be able to start testing and customizing your own code right away.

Part 3

Using the Gamepad API and Controller.js

Lastly, we discuss the capabilities of the Gamepad API and the limitations and missing features which led us to develop our own custom library, Controller.js.