The future of TV

Television is changing. Internet is increasingly used for distributing TV content. People can watch TV stations live over the internet, and they can view vast amounts of video clips on the web sites of TV channels and, of course, on all the social media sites. Television is becoming interactive.

Still, people watch the good old TV – nowadays often on wide screen home theatres – as much or more as they did earlier. There’s still something very compelling to just sit back, relax, and enjoy high quality programs together with family and friends.

Lately, we have seen launches of new tablet computers, the iPad by Apple being the most prominent. The evolution of laptop computers have been taking computers to this direction for some time now: lighter, thinner, better batteries, touch input, fluent connectivity, etc.

We at Nordkapp and at SuomiTV have identified these two trends, and we wanted to explore what this convergence will mean for the business of a broadcast television channel.

If you haven’t yet seen our concept video yet, you can see it on Vimeo.

From insight to implementation

We approached this by utilizing Nordkapp’s design process, which takes its main inspiration from the people – consumers or potential users of the projected solution. The process starts with the Insight phase, where we analyze users, trends, business, and technology. Then we move on to Synthesis phase to create the concept, and lastly to the Implementation phase, where the concept is refined, specified and taken through to the final carefully detailed, fully working solution.

Do people need tablets?

Computers in a form of a tablet haven’t been yet widely available yet – at least for larger consumer groups. People haven’t yet formed habits of how, where and for what tablet computers would be used. Therefore, we first wanted to do small user research studies, in order to find opportunities how tablets would naturally fit people’s everyday lives.

We visited people in their homes and observed and interviewed them about their use of TV, laptops and other media. It is always so refreshing, eye-opening and insightful to meet and talk with people and discuss their habits, usage patterns, expectations, fears, and attitudes towards technology.

Disappearing computer

One of the primary patterns we identified was that laptops were fluently used around the house. In particular, people had the habit of bringing the laptops to living rooms and using them while watching TV. Seeing this pattern repeatedly gave us the insight that laptops are currently used to fulfill the needs for internet, interactive content, and social use (Facebook etc) also while being together. People found this much more social than staying in different rooms at their computers.

As laptops are still somewhat cumbersome to move around, we found that this is a perfect opportunity for the tablet computer: to complement the relaxed TV-watching, typically in the living room. Tablets are less intrusive than laptops: they don’t have the display that protrudes between people. The relaxed use with swipes and gestures with the tablet casually on the lap is perfect for living room use. The computer disappears.

Complementing the TV

A straightforward design of a TV application to a tablet computer would probably contain a large window to display the TV stream. But how silly that would be! If you are sitting down in your living room, in front of the large-screen TV, why would you watch the same on the tablet? After the first interviews we soon understood that our application on a tablet must not just copy the TV. Instead, it must complement it.

The tablets are optimal devices for providing complementing information to the live TV programs. You can have an additional screen for the program guide, further information about the programs, links to IMDB database or Wikipedia for detailed information about movies, and more information available about the advertisements that you simultaneously see on the TV. If you would browse through any of this on the same large screen on your living room wall, this would drive your family and friends mad. Intensive interaction is best to be done alone.

With our design we support people being social while they are together. But of course, nowadays “social” has another meaning too. With tablets, it will be possible to be social over the distance and discuss, share, rate, poke, throw a sheep, and whatnot with your friends. As a complement to the TV, the tablet is the natural UI for social media while enjoying TV.

Naturally, you will have moments when you’re not in front of your home theatre and yet want to watch a program on the TV. This requires that the tablet has a second mode that provides a lean-back user interface with no or little interruptions, preferably in landscape orientation.

And radio, too?

We found also other fascinating ideas for tablets. When they are easy to carry around the house, they will be brought to places like bedside tables or to the bathroom, where they are used for entertainment and news, for example while applying make-up or taking a shower. In these use cases, tablets will assume the role of the radio: perfect for background information and entertainment.

Design drivers

We concluded the insights phase with workshops, where we defined the design drivers for our concept. Design drivers describe the design intent in a short, crystallized sentences that are easy for the designers to keep in mind.

Our design drivers were:

Cherish touch
Tablets have touch UI, so it should be used to its full potential. It’s always good to interact directly with the content rather than with artificial controls and levers.

Complement large-screen TV
Don’t just do what the TV does, but complement with additional interaction, features, social use, etc.

Respect full screen viewing
When user is enjoying the full screen TV, provide a laid back UI. Use subtle notifications and avoid interruptions.

High quality and relevant content
SuomiTV ensures that the TV content is of high quality. Filter it further according to recommendations by friends to make it more relevant.

Good for people, good for advertiser
The tablet enables new advertising models, especially when used together with the live TV. At best, ads provide real value to the user.

Next up: Designing the concept – read more in Nordkapp blog.

++
The concept is a result of compact three weeks of intensive work. We produced quite a bit of ideas and material of which about 25% made it to the final concept. Naturally our intention is to share as much as we can, so look out for more posts delving into related material.

Remember to check out the other parts as well;

• PART 2: TAP THE TV – New Interactions
• Our concept video on Vimeo
• Our concept video on Youtube

UX leadership insight #1: Clear design drivers
UX leadership insight #2: Vague or specific?
UX leadership insight #3: Pick your battles
UX leadership insight #4: Appropriately radical
UX leadership insight #5: Split it
UX leadership insight #6: Milestones are good for you
UX leadership insight #7: Difficulty of UX design reviews
UX leadership insight #8: UX and agile
UX leadership insight #9: Demos are not only for demos
UX leadership insight #10: Tools of trade
UX leadership insight #11: Skill is everything
UX leadership insight #12: The space between
UX leadership insight #13: Bell curve
UX leadership insight #14: Tacit knowledge
UX leadership insight #15: You

I hope you enjoyed! And now something completely different…

This is my last post in this series of design leadership. I have saved the most personal one as last.

The last design leadership insight is about you. Simply, take care of yourself. Most of the time you need to worry about other people: users, designers, stakeholders, managers. If you only do that, you will exhaust yourself. Get your weekly rest. Do something else than work too. Keep in shape.

If you are tired or in a bad mood, it will result in bad judgment and it will limit your openness to new ideas. You will impatiently look for the easiest solutions. The team can sense when you are grumpy, and then nobody will have fun any more.

When you are in energetic and in a good mood, so will the whole team. A team with positive attitude and good spirit is very resistant to any setbacks. Designers will seek for best solutions, not just the ones that work and pass the reviews. In good mood it is easier to be self-critical about the work. This is the key to designs that not just good but great.

It all starts from you. Smile!

In a large project, there will always be some churn in the design team. Some designers will eventually leave, and there will be some new members that join the team during the process. Sometimes, when there are schedule pressure in the project, you can try to catch up by adding a couple of extra designers to the project. New hires, freelancers, agencies – there are always people available (if you have deep pockets).

In a large design project you will have vast amount of tacit knowledge that is never written down. You may have documents describing the original design drivers or goals of the project. However, the interpretation of those drivers take place during the design process. People who enter the project later haven’t been part of that process of creating the shared understanding. They don’t get it.

The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.

As design lead, you have a key role in transferring the tacit knowledge hidden in the existing design team to the new team members. It will take time – they need to “get it” by copying others work, and through trial and error. You must spend quality time with them, walking through their design proposals and discussing if those are aligned with the rest of the designs. You can try to delegate this to a senior designer in the team, too, by pairing them up.

There are no quick fixes to resource gaps in design projects. Sometimes you have to get new designers to fill in, but be prepared that this will require that you invest a significant share of your time to it.

As with many other natural phenomena, the skills of designers follow a bell curve. There are always a few super productive ones, lots of in-between, and then some at the tail of the curve. Factors that determine the productivity and quality of design work include training, experience, or simply – if I dare to say aloud – talent.

In a large design project you certainly will have designers from all over the bell curve. Naturally, you probably try to optimize that you can be working with the best people all the time. But the same bell curve will still be there with the group of the best… So my question is this: how to assign different design tasks for different kinds of designers?

The obvious answer would be that you put the strongest in the most challenging and most relevant tasks, and the less experienced in the least significant parts of the design. However, if you do this, you will have one surprising effect. You probably need to spend more time with the inexperienced designers than the strong ones. They need more support, they have more questions, they need your design input and supervision more frequently, their designs will have more comments in reviews, etc. As a result, you will be spending most of your time in the design tasks that you just had decided to be less central to the success of the project.

I think that the key to solving such issues lies in careful teaming: the designers will be split in working teams or pairs where less experienced always work with more experienced colleagues. In this way, the responsibility of tutoring is distributed more evenly. The same challenges will still be there in the small teams, but they will still be more manageable that way.

PS. I have been considering for a long time if I should write about this delicate topic. I sincerely hope that nobody that I’ve ever worked with will take offense.

How should the teams for design be built? There are thousands of handbooks how to build effective teams, so let’s not get into the generics. There’s one specific aspect of design teamwork that I would like to emphasize, and that is the collaboration of interaction design and visual design.

I may have mentioned before, that in a process where interaction designer creates wireframes and then hands them over to a visual designer for decoration, the result often is — decorated boxes. Creating something more, something that is novel, meaningful, effective, fluid, dynamic, alive, and mesmerizing, will require very close cooperation between interaction design and visual design. The boundaries between disciplines are the surfaces where the most communication problems arise, but – I claim – that also the magic happens.

The best designs are such where ingenious interaction design meets ingenious visual design. Therefore my optimal team setup would be such that there are always one interaction designer paired with one visual designer. (This is not unlike the AD + copy pairing so common in advertising industry.) They both need to understand and respect each others work, and get along very well otherwise too. When I see this connection in action, when I overhear these designers sitting side by side and arguing and developing ideas together, I know that we are doing something that very few design studios can.

Mikko Franck, a respected Finnish conductor, was asked to help out and rehearse with an amateur orchestra for a full weekend. He arrived at the site, and just for a trial started to conduct the first composition. The musicians in the orchestra didn’t play particularly well. In fact, they struggled to keep in their tunes. After a few bars he put his baton down and said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you”, and walked out.

I’m not 100% sure that this is a true story. Nevertheless, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t make the point of the story any less clear. Just like the orchestra conductor, you as a design lead you should concentrate in the big picture and the nuances of the details that make designs perfect. If the basic skills of the designers that you work with are not there, it will take a lot from your time to simply teach people how to design.

As discussed earlier in this series, you will need a lot of raw material from the designers, based on which you can steer the project. In addition to being able to create solid designs and creative solutions (preferably better than you ever could), the designers must master the basic tools and able to express themselves verbally and visually, and be great communicators. Only then they will be efficiently provide the raw material for you that you need so that you can orchestrate the design.

Naturally, there will be different designers that you will have the chance to work with. Some will be less, some more experienced. You must coach new designers to be part of the team. But don’t let that take all your time.

PS. Sorry for the long gap between #10 and #11. Been busy with fascinating projects – and also the series is now starting to discuss issues with people so maybe I’m subconsciously postponing these as it’s difficult to stay politically correct.

Watercolor paintings and oil paintings look no doubt quite different. The artist had a vision about the desired end result and then selected the painting technique that is best suited to reach it. In any form of art or craft, the tool is always visible in the end result. The same applies to interaction design.

The most typical process for interaction design is to draw wireframes of screens. After that, a visual designer will start working on the wireframes and designs the visuals. This process and selection of tools will be visible in the end result. Let’s say, if you design with Visio/Omnigraffle/Powerpoint, and then fill in the boxes with graphics, you will get … boxes with graphics: screens after screens, dialog boxes, windows, discrete states, z-hierarchy.

However, discrete (yet pretty) boxes is not my ideal of an optimal UI. What is your view as a design lead, what kind of result would you like to see? In my view, the UIs should be much more dynamic and fluid: canvases that transform to other canvases, objects that flex and transform, use of different shapes, fluent transitions. Interaction, that is genuinely utilizing the continuity of time. UIs that never stand completely still. Interaction that smoothly leads viewer’s eyes, hands and mind.
I’m not sure if there are proper design tools available for this. What would be the next generation of Harel’s state charts to describe and specify fluid interaction? Anyone?

Demos are great for many purposes. The most obvious ones are to communicate the design to someone else, and test the UI with end users. However, in a large design project, the less obvious purposes may be the most important ones.

A demo or a simulation is the best tool for telling about the ongoing designs for people outside the project. You can try to explain the design intent and use cases with bullet points on paper, but when people see and feel the designs, they will finally understand. In my work when presenting designs, I usually have simply skipped all slideware and presented the design only through an interactive demo. While using the demo it is quite easy to verbally point out different elements in the design, and at the same time tell the background story; the design rationale. It’s also a good test if you really know your story.

You can’t get a feeling of an interactive UI on paper. The first audience for a demo is the designer herself, or you as a design lead. By trying the designs out you can be confident that they really do work (for the user). With experience you can predict quite accurately if a design will perform well in user testing. Naturally, surprises still do happen.

One important aspect of building demos is process related. Without a demo, you perhaps can keep on working with different parts of the designs separately. Designing like that for long you run a risk that at the end, the bits and pieces will not fit together. Here where building demos help. The prototype engineer (or whoever does this for you) needs to get all the designs, well documented, with all the graphic files, and then make them all work together in the demo. Usually you will find that there are quite a few gaps, missing designs etc. A demo will force you to put together a complete system, not just parts of it.

A demo is a shared effort of the whole design team. Everyone’s contribution is needed. Demos help you feel that you are building one system together. If you can include good looking, although not necessarily final, graphics into the demos, you can also give the team a good morale boost. They start to see their efforts materialize and set further expectations for the final delivery.

PS. Fascinating discussion initiated by Jon Kolko here. I wonder if I should change the name of the series to “Interaction design leadership”…

Agile software methodologies were developed for creating small software applications for company internal use. The process was intended for small software teams. Most certainly, no user experience folks were involved. Anyway, software developer is UI designer’s best friend. If agile makes them perform and feel better, it is good for UI design too. Agile is just very, very different to the traditional UI design process.

Design process itself is agile. I doubt that there are any interaction or visual designs that were designed with a pure waterfall model. In any challenging design task, when you start to draft solutions, you soon understand if the original design intent that you are aiming at is correct after all. The iterative nature of detailed UX design, with prototyping and evaluations interleaved, bears similarities with agile.

My experience in embedding UX design in agile is that although some parts of the process are not completely compatible (for example, I strongly recommend fixing the basic concept before development sprints start), there are so many benefits in agile that I am a true supporter of this approach. Designers must be integral part of the sprint teams. In that way, they participate sprint planning, scrum meetings etc so they can every day keep track what happens with the implementation. Usually designs need to be iterated during the implementation – nobody can design pixel perfect stuff in one go – so optimizing the UI and SW together can improve the quality while the code is being written rather than with fixes afterwards.

Designers often don’t understand all the possibilities of the modern SW engineering tools, ready-made components , etc. While working with coders, the designers can learn that designs they thought would be difficult to implement may actually be quite easy. And designers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. The best design ideas might come from SW guys too.

Close collaboration helps developers share the feeling of ownership of the designs. They want to implement something really good rather than just what has been specified. UX designers should learn to appreciate their best friends much, much more.