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.

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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

As you’ve probably seen from the Youtube videos, the iPad/iPhone direct interaction is as close to natural interface as one gets. The absense of a pointing device removes an extra step from between the user and the interface, and multitouch naturally adds to this in a very exciting way. In this article I’ll go through a few pointers about our tablet concept, and of course how and why we arrived into our design decisions.

Form equals function

Conceptually iPad has two orientations—vertical and horizontal. We came to the conclusion that in a context of TV use the form should be respected to some extent: the portrait form is perfect for browsing and reading content, whereas the landscape facilitates more old fashioned, TV use. One major factor supporting this is the broadcast industry heritage especially with aspect ratios of TV content. This is actually quite significant because SuomiTV has 100%  HD production pipeline, and hence all the content is very high quality 16:9.

Pointing fingers

From the start one of the main ideas for this concept was to have as little interface as possible and let people interact directly with the content itself. With iPad this comes quite naturally, and we felt we should take the whole notion of a seamless interface one step futher.

Despite being a young platform, thanks to other, earlier iProducts, the iPad comes with clear interaction language already familiar to users. There are three kind of controls in this concept; direct, gestural and physical interaction. The primary way of interaction is tapping the screen and receiving an immediate response. In addition to this, there are simple physical gestures such as swipe. In fact, these two(!) things are all you need to learn in order to use an iPad. And since we’re talking about direct manipulation, the learning curve is almost nonexistent.

Not just one, but two

What we did is build a gestural system on top of this. Single finger tap + swipes are reserved for navigation and straightforward tasks. Placing two fingers on the screen means either more prominent tasks such as swapping playlists and saving videos locally for later use. In our initial concept we also toyed around familiar gestures such as pinch, but ended up leaving it out from the final concept for later development. Instead, the landscape use gives you access to joystick-like contextual video controls, which enable an enjoyable flow without having to concentrate pointing accurately on a timeline.

The third way to interact with the content is physical interaction with the device itself. We believe that by physical interaction with digital content makes it more real and tangible. There’s some great potential here, and we included in the concept playful little things such as shaking the device to shuffle a playlist, and tapping the side of the device to fast forward / scrub a video.

Selected screens (click for larger)

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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 1: TAP THE TV – the concept
• Our concept video on Vimeo
• Our concept video on Youtube

The theme of WDC Helsinki 2012 is Open City, and in similar vain the workshops on May 22nd are voluntary, free-for-all events. Their aim is to join the organizers to brainstorm, discuss and plan what the year 2012 as World Design Capital can mean and be for everybody. For us at Nordkapp this notion of openness and transparency hits close to home—we believe the initial ideas are merely the starting point for innovation, and they should be shared for everyone willing to interpret them their way. Also by sharing our ideas them we enable richer and more meaningful dialogue for everyone around us, including the local design community and of course the city itself.

This is why we were excited to have an opportunity to organize a workshop as part of the official open ideas -day, on none the less than our recent favorite subject: urban screens and information design for urban context. The city is becoming filled with touchscreens, navigation aids and sensors of all kind, and we’d like to have a think on what this really could means for the city of Helsinki. The possibilities are endless, and we think this has a huge potential of being awesome in many ways. Here’s the synopsis our friend, collaborator and workshop participant Adam Greenfield wrote for us;

“In the last few years, we’ve become surrounded by screens as we move through the city: personal devices, shared interactive surfaces, and now even building-sized displays. Thinking about how to design for each of these things individually was hard enough, and virtually nobody has given much thought to how they function together, as a coherent informational ecosystem.

Until now. Join us for a day of activity dedicated to understanding these challenges and the new urban information design. We’ll move back and forth between conceptual thinking and practical doing, developing solid ideas about making the most meaningful use of the emerging resources culturally, commercially, personally and socially.”

In the workshop we are hoping to have thinkers, doers and deciders interested in the topic. The event will be loosely organized and will include a few talks/presentations such as Adam on urbanism and networked mobility, our research on urban screens in Helsinki, possibly open data and then some. Welcome to join in, but since our space is limited please let us know about your participation, either by emailing sami at nordkapp dot fi or by posting a comment below.

So where does the magic happen?

The place is our new office at Köydenpunojankatu 2, Helsinki and the time Saturday May 22nd, 11am – 3 pm (-ish). Welcome!

Update: The Facebook event page is now live as well.

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.

Bit of a background— at Nordkapp, we work with a fairly systematic process/framework which we apply to each project we do. SuomiTV was no exception—we started with a competitor analysis, which we then turned into some obvious opportunities and design drivers. After presenting the findings to our client, we proceeded to synthesize these findings into a high-level concept, which again was approved and designed into more granular and real world designs screen by screen.

After the workshop 1 it was already obvious we were designing a quite complex system with a very tight schedule. This naturally led us to implement the features into a very clear roadmap touching fairly many facets of the client’s business— and of course to deliver first concept documents and design assets to our agile partner, SBA, as soon as possible. Business as usual, and in a way we’ve handled quite a few projects recently. This whole project took about four weeks from start to finish. Not too much time in our hands, but still quite doable when designing a clear and concise service with clear drivers and all stakeholders working together seamlessly.

So, dear reader, I’m sure you can imagine our surprise a while ago when we received the information from Brightcove that we had indeed set a world record with this one. Our project had indeed been designed and implemented into a fully working system tapped into SuomiTV’s HD broadcast pipeline faster than anyone before. Quite impressive when talking about a platform which runs services for more than 1300 organizations all around the world.

Of course, things like this are more a byproduct of a successful project than anything else, and don’t hold that much of a value unless the main product itself is successful as well. But one thing is for sure— we are very happy and honored to work with partners like this, and especially with a client, Mikael, who trusts us his business and dares to take the leap with us. That is courage we are extremely grateful for.

What comes to the actual product, you can check the first public release at SuomiTV.fi/nettitv. We are currently working on quite a few aspects of the site and the business, but more about that later on. Meanwhile, please share us your thoughts and tell us what you think.

Our team that worked on the project consisted of Teppo (IxD lead), Petri (visual lead), Ilkka and myself. Teppo and Petri’s input spanned throughout the whole project, whereas I was responsible for the initial insight and high level concept, and Ilkka made sure our dialogue with Mikael + SBA was as seamless as possible.

Image credit: bass_nroll on Flickr

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.

Presentation schedule

Helsinki Design Capital 2012 – Palvelumuotoilu kaupunkimediassa

9.00 Welcome, Esa Blomberg & Helena Hyvärinen

9.10 4 things to remember when designing service interactions Anton Schubert, 358

9.30 Miten palvelumuotoilu luo mahdollisuuksia kaupunkiympäristössä Mikko Koivisto, Yatta

9.50 Palvelumuotoilussa oli avaimet voittoon: Forum Virium Helsinki ja WDC (world design capital 2012)

10.10 case I, Mikko Jäppinen, Palmu inc

10.20 case II, Teppo Kotirinta, Nordkapp