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Why Smart TV User Interfaces Suck

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Please don’t look at the following images on a full stomach:


Ok, sorry I had to do that, but it’s important.  And to my friends on the TV manufacturing side of the world – it’s not your fault!  It’s not your fault! Most “Smart TV” user interfaces, suck, and you’re doing your best.  But fundamentally they violate so many rules of user experience design. But why are they so bad?  In a nutshell, its for the same reason you don’t expect loggers to sell fancy high-end furniture (think about that one for a second).  The products are being built from the wrong end of the production team.

For the dining room table, what do you think, arrow foot or ball foot?

Let’s agree that user experience design is a challenge to begin with.  Apple does it great, everyone else, not so much – and even Apple products have flaws.  Further, virtually everything about a “ten foot” user interface (the terminology we use to describe what happens on-screen on your TV) is a broken interaction model, so this is going to be crippled no matter what.  I’ll write about this more in the future, but I believe there’s a fundamental breakdown on the limitations of what you can do with any 10′ UI and a remote control, regardless of gestures, speech, etc.

Next, per my logger analogy, effectively the teams building these products have absolutely no experience nor expertise at this kind of design.  The world of consumer electronics has (barely) evolved from dials, knobs, and switches to doing highly complicated interfaces on screens.  Not only that, every year the requirements are changing!

And since this is a new field (despite almost 20 years worth of ten-foot UIs), there are very very few folks out there who have dived deeply into this problem (the Wikipedia page on the topic barely even requires a scrollbar to read everything).  So the same people who are used to just getting the TV to work right, are now also in charge of creating “an experience”.  I think this is a guaranteed to fail situation, and it’s unfortunate for everyone involved.

The last "easy" TV user interface.

I do have some tips and thoughts for these UIs, since I can’t effectively get everyone to just up and stop making them (pretty please?).  First, you can read my comments a while back on designing better Boxee and Google TV apps.  Now, here’s three more things to think about:

  • Stop making things look like Commodore 64 graphics.  Seriously, I understand the graphics processors inside the TV platforms are low powered inexpensive solutions, but people have a natural (bad) reaction to seeing such low quality graphics on their beautiful HD sets.  If you can’t match them up, find ways to cut down on the overall interface and use the scarce resources to make things prettier.  See Boxee, Google TV, and Apple TV for the “prettier” 10-foot experiences.

Now in beautiful Full 1080p HD

  • Understand a 2D “grid” of options.  Many of these UIs create multiple planes of interfaces, yet fail to recognize the user has to navigate with a simple UDLR remote control (or wand or whatever).  This creates unpredictable experiences, and makes your user less naturally comfortable with the interface.  You should be able to look at the screen and always know “what happens if I push the Up arrow button”.
  • Reduce button clicks.  At no point should the user have to click more than 3 times to get from one part of the screen to another, and you should never create an internal scrollable region.  For example, my VUDU service (which I love) has me scroll through long lists of movies when browsing a category (such as Comedy/Drama, which, let’s face it, really means depressing movie with some funny moments).  But, as a result, if I want to change the category,I need to scroll all the way up to the top of the screen again to choose a new option.  This is too much work!

Ultimately, this again reinforces my belief that anything new coming from Apple will be highly based on AirPlay concepts, and the 10-foot UI will one day be a thing of the past.  And what will replace it?  This.

Smart TV: Not Dead Yet!

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I'm Not Dead Yet!

There’s a post on Wired entitled “Smart-TV Space May Never Take Off as Predicted” in which the author quotes a comment from ViewSonic:

“’Smart TV’ has not achieved the consumer acceptance or market expectation… that was forecasted over the last couple years. In addition, consumer spending for Smart TV’s in general has experienced a significant slow down as the economy has slowed. Our current strategy is to stay involved with the various technology developments and consider them in the future as they become available.”

Now with all due respect to ViewSonic, the last time I checked they didn’t rank in the top 5 TV manufacturers, and based on looking at prior years reports, my hunch is they represent somewhere between 0-3% of TVs sold (they do well in monitors, not as much in TVs).  So when they predict Smart TV to have a problem, perhaps they aren’t the voice we should be using, as compared to companies such as Samsung, who has over 2 million Smart TVs in homes already.

Q2’11 Worldwide Flat Panel TV Brand Rankings by Revenue Share

Source: DisplaySearch Quarterly Advanced Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report

As Michael Wolf, of GigaOM, tweeted: “Folks, Viewsonic is not the bellweather company by which to judge success of embryonic sector on #smarttv.” Now that said, I completely agree with James McQuivey (Forrester analyst who is hitting Smart TV issues squarely on the head):

“What’s happening in the connected TV space is it’s not really about what consumers want, it’s about what manufacturers are making,” Forrester principal analyst James McQuivey says. “Simply having a connected TV doesn’t mean you’ll actually use it.”

According to all the analysts and manufacturers I’ve spoken with personally, and that’s virtually all of them, the industry is pretty well agreed that somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of all Smart TVs actually get connected.  Further, the vast majority of them are just using them for Netflix, and just about everything else is getting pretty well ignored (stats show the #1 Smart TV app is Netflix, #2 is YouTube, and #3 is “other”).

The Wired author goes on to cite failures of the Google TV Revue box as more evidence to why the market is stuttering.  The truth is, the Revue box is failing because it’s a lousy product with a poor customer value proposition, and Kevin Bacon commercials aren’t enough to pull the wool over it.  But this would be like saying there’s no SmartPhone market because the BlackBerry Storm wasn’t so hot.

BlackBerry Angry Birds

Wait a sec, that's not a touch screen!

Last January I wrote a piece for Mashable called “5 Reasons Connected TV Could Flop in 2011” and in my opinion, all 5 of those problems are happening.  And I don’t see anybody really emerging out of the pack to do it any better – yet.  In fact, I’d wager we’re going to go a full calendar year from now before seeing signs of change.  And here’s why:

The TV UI (aka “ten foot user interface” aka “lean back UI” aka “onscreen display”) is simply unable to scale to meet the demands of convergence.  I’ll write more on this topic in the next couple of weeks, but mark my words: we have utterly reached the apex of functionality of all forms of TV-based user interfaces/experiences.

I believe TiVo pushed the concept to the breaking point with their original UX back in 1999, and I’ve seen nothing push it further since.  Yes, there are some prettier looking things out there, with beautiful icons/etc, but from a UX standpoint, we’re well past the zenith of what you can do with a remote.  And no, I don’t believe gestures are going to cut it either, and I’ll go into depth on that topic in an upcoming post as well.

I'd change the channel, but honestly my arms are just too tired.

The last point on Smart TV I have is this – the biggest “thing” that’s going to slow down all forms of growth is replacement cycle consideration.  If you buy a device once every 7-8 years, yet know intrinsically that the technology inside that device will be outdated long before that, you are less likely to buy it.  The only way manufacturers can solve this problem, as far as I can see it, is through a modular component that will enable future-proofing of the set.  Hm, yup, time for a blog post on that.

So is the Smart TV world fragmented? Yes. Confounded? Yes. Faced with turbulence? Yes.  Full of shoddy products that are causing backlash and poor word of mouth due to radically complicated living room experiences when all we want to do is kick back, turn on Bear Grylls, and have a beer? Absolutely. Dying? Nope, not even a tiny bit.

Thanks, Steve!

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Apple is one of those companies that tends to polarize people. Some hate them for “closed” systems.  Others love them for beautiful products.  Some call them evil and bullying.  Others say they open markets.  I’m not one to debate, so I’ll just cut to the chase by saying Apple, in the past decade, has contributed more to consumer technology than most other companies combined.  And it’s fairly hard to argue that the Apple of today is entirely the company Steve built.

Steve Jobs’ resignation hits hard, but the only thing that comes as a surprise is the seeming suddenness of it (Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he actually resigned. That was extremely sudden).  Here’s a list of some of the things, love em or hate em, that we should all be thankful of Jobs/Apple for (and yes, I’m sure some dude in some lab somewhere invented all these things about 300 years ago, but if it weren’t for Apple, we all wouldn’t know about them):

  • Internet-based music distribution: from iTunes to Pandora to Spotify to Turntable, had it not been for Apple creating the iPod+iTunes ecosystem, it’s unlikely the music industry would’ve had sufficient motivation to enable “digital” as fast as they did.  The MP3 market would’ve grown much slower, resulting in less buy-in from the industry, resulting in a lack of streaming and on-demand services.  Would we have something like it today?  Probably.  Would it all be priced the way it is today?  Doubtful.  It took the muscle of the iPod’s dominance to enable Apple to negotiate the entire music industry into the $0.99 pricing schema we have today.  It’s likely that companies such as Amazon and Sony would’ve ended up much strong in this space, but we’d probably be paying more for the same content, and I’d wager services like Pandora would never have gotten off the ground.
  • “Real” smartphones: Unquestionably smartphones predate the iPhone.  Blackberries had some “smartness” and earlier generation Windows Mobile devices actually provided quite a bit of functionality, not to mention the granddaddy of them all, the Palm/Treo lines.  But let’s face it, the iPhone really changed everything.  Capacitive touchscreens (remember the stylus? nope, me neither), app stores (more on that to come), and more, all thanks to the iPhone’s success.  I think Nokia and RIM would still be considered the leaders in the mobile space if Apple had never shipped an iPhone, and team Android should be exceptionally grateful for its existence.
  • Gestures: Pinch + Zoom? Swipe? Multi-finger scroll?  One could argue this is just a subset of the smartphone, but it’s not, as gesture support has improved the computing experience overall.  Prior to the “two finger scroll” feature on MacBooks, the only thing even close was the variety of PC manufacturers who enabled the right-side scroll region on their inputs.  Once again, an area where numerous companies could’ve beaten Apple to the punch, but simply didn’t.
  • The Internet: Just kidding.
  • That's a Vaio?

    Nice Macbook, er, Vaio.

    Bringing Sexy Back: From the moment Steve rejoined Apple through to today, the company’s products have set the standard for technology aesthetics.  Whether it’s the sleek industrial design, the minimalistic approach, the amazing attention to detail, or the use of aluminium, it’s as if Apple showed up in a Porsche while everyone around them were driving Volvos (boxy, but good).  As a result, there’s been an almost frenetic rush to make distinctive, beautiful technology.  And some of it’s even been pretty good!

  • Changing Retail: When Apple first announced they’d open their own retail stores, they were literally laughed at. There’s now over 300 of them, and they are unbelievably successful.  They are considered the best retail customer experience overall. They are wildly profitable.  Consumers enjoy going there even when they don’t buy things.  In fact, my only surprise here is the lack of copycats – nobody’s even close to creating a similar experience at such a grand level.  Well, maybe in China…
  • The App Economy: Yes, my PalmPilot had installable apps, and so did my Windows Mobile phone.  But it took Apple to create a nearly $4-BILLION app economy and marketplace.  My hunch here is without Apple revolutionizing the concept (by, again, creating a full end-to-end experience regarding discovery, installation, and most importantly, payment, for apps), we’d have nothing even as advanced as the Android market is today, which I still consider to be floundering in the dust relatively (simple tip to radically improve said experience: sort all apps AND reviews by device – will fix 80% of fragmentation problems in one fell swoop).
  • The iPad: Remember when tablets really sucked?  Guess what, they still do.  But what doesn’t suck is the iPad.  Other than speculation and conjecture, the reality check is the only successful “tablet-like product” on the market is the iPad, all others pale in comparison.  I could write a dozen or so blog posts on what everybody else is doing wrong, but the thing that matters here is all the things Apple did right.  They made something that perfectly fits into a few dozen million peoples’ lives.  Flash? Nobody cares.  USB?  Nobody cares.  “Closed system”?  Nobody cares.  The iPad, as if by magic, navigated through the waters of touch-input devices to create the admittedly-not-perfect product, but so far beyond “good enough” that it’s changed computing as we know it.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of things that the company did that I can’t even recall at this moment, but these were the ones that hit me as most important.  How did they do it?  The comfort in saying “no, we can’t ship that yet, it’s just not ready.”  The comfort in saying “it’s okay if we aren’t providing every feature known to man, just so long as our features are great.”  The comfort in saying “we don’t have to be perfectly compatible with all other technologies that have come before us, if we make a strong ecosystem ourselves.”  The comfort in saying “we believe this is what people really want, and we’re going to give it to them.”

These are statements that no other technology manufacturer or provider make, so far as I’ve seen in my career (with brief exceptions, such as Sling, Flip, and a handful of others).

When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in the late 90s, it’s well known that he rapidly ripped apart products, cut staff, and trimmed down the entire operation to get radically focused.  Since then, beyond all the technology and products, what Steve’s done the most is built the very DNA of the Apple that we know today.  The real contribution Steve made, in my opinion, was creating a culture of building to perfection, and understanding what that means as a core essence.

As I commented on TechCrunch, “Much like when a pitcher walks from the mound, the entire tech industry should stand and give a round of applause for one who has contributed so much.”

Time to call it a day

When a pitcher takes that walk, sometimes it’s because they’re pulled.  But every now and then, that pitcher gave his all, kicked some amazing ass, and it’s just time for him to take a rest.  But along the way he carried or maybe even made the game.  And his spirit carries the team even further.  And for those of us watching on the sidelines, we rise with applause, out of thanks and respect.

You rocked our world!

And then the game carries on.