Remote Control

THE CHALLENGE

Design and develop a remote control that will be paired with our new in home leased video experience HNav.  The remote should be paired with the navigator and honor the key principles of the user experience.  The layout should be rethought, based on the customers priorities, and should be simple enough to operate even in the dark.  Oh, and while you’re at it, can you upgrade the look and feel without skyrocketing the price.

THE SOLUTION

We had the luxury of being able to design HNav and the remote in tandem.  We approached all feature design from the perspective of both the remote and the interface.  Starting with the experience and brand guidelines, we executed concepts that were communicated upwards to executive management and outward to vendors.  We developed working prototype units that we used in-house while developing code, as well as tested with customers.  We iterated on the design, tested some more, and even pivoted along the way.  The end result is a reduced button count, an increased perception of quality, and we threw in some motion activated backlighting and RF4CE capability for good measure.  All with only a slight increase in the cost per unit.

TODAY

We started with an analysis of the current state of the remote.  We evaluated all our competitors remotes, as well as the many remotes currently available in the field.  But we didn’t stop with MVPD remotes, we also considered devices from OTT services like Roku and Apple.  During this evaluation we were keenly aware that current remotes are far too complex for the average user.

With a good understanding of the landscape we turned to the experience and the brand.  Our brand guidelines offer the direction of simple and modern, but not simplistic or cutting-edge.  Initial concepts were reduced and approachable, but not overly techy.

The Current Landscape

We also had another consideration to keep in mind, which was the ever increasing availability of first or third party services interfacing with our video products.  We were well aware of the capabilities, current or future, of both TWC TV and companies like Twitter, Facebook, Zeebox, etc.  With all these advanced features coming online in the near future, we knew that we didn’t have to boil the ocean with our remote.

We created three silos for our concepts.  A standard remote that would still be reduced but familiar to current MVPD subscribers.  A more simple concept that would really reduce the button count and as a result rely more heavily on the user interface to complete tasks.  And finally something very innovative, and potentially expensive.  Something that would really blow people away, but might risk violating our brand guidelines, and may end up being a premium for the customers.

Input from Marketing

At this point we turned to paper sketching.  We created piles of concept sketches.  Some started with the form and worked back to the button layout, others used the button layout and proximity to drive the form.  We also worked with the marketing department to solicit feedback and unique concepts from them and their agency.

To help realize these concepts and gauge their viability we engaged with a selection of vendors to create CAD models of our chosen 3 concepts.  Where someone like Apple will really push the capabilities of their vendors, we knew we had a product to deliver and needed to ensure at least an understanding of the viability of our concepts in physical form.  We also don’t staff industrial designers, so this was an opportunity to reach out and gather input from someone more skilled in the art.

Prototyping

After visualizing a collection of concepts within our three verticals, hardware manufacturer Woojin was on-boarded to develop physical models and working prototype units.  This concept was rejected because the keyboard implied a level of complexity that wasn’t intended.

In april of 2013 we were invited to Comcast to experience their relatively new X-1 product, and get a sneak peek at X-2.  After spending some time with Comcast’s new remote it was decided to reject the current design path in favor of a more traditional approach.  We reverted to our more “standard” concept and immediately went back to the drawing board.  Now that we had a concept, and executive backing, it was time to build some working prototypes.  The first run produced 50 working units that were divided up between engineering and the UX team for testing.  Using Hnav running in a browser and an IR repeater, we were able to test users on HNav with both the current remote control and the new version.  We ran our tests in NY & Dallas with 32 customers.  These tests were also our first instance of using eye-tracking.  The setup used a pair of glasses that could not only track the users eye movement, but also display their current gaze superimposed over the subject matter on a monitor in the observation room  This allowed us to follow peoples progression through the UI, or more importantly, across the remote in real time.