Project 3

Strategic Requirements

Business Requirements

China Telecom

Needs a cloud game TV targeting at young people as well as family users. Since its own Tianyi Cloud Games had no hardware platform and the user experience is inconsistent across different devices.

Competing products

TCL and Samsung have successively launched their rotating TVs, breaking the traditional TV form.

Changhong

Plans to customize TVs that will be purchased then sold by our partners. The business model is hardware sales + app distribution + operating income sharing.

User Needs

Young people: keen on short videos

As the first generation nurtured by technology, Gen Z’s brains can process information faster, and cope with greater cognitive challenges. In China, short video apps like Tiktok have become the most popular social media.

WGSN “Formula Z”

Trends of living room appliances

Living rooms are getting rid of the same old face, and becoming more containing and personalized. The function of living room has shifted from social and ostentatious to family self-content and self-realizing.

Suning Online Market “2020 Living Room Consumption White Paper”

Target Personas

· Post-95s, newbies of career.
· Most live in the small-sized rental room.
· Enjoy the fun of multiple subdivision circles.
· Strong self-consciousness and willing of expression.
· Love barrage culture, have rich experience in creating short videos and Vlogs.
· Prefer hardcore technology products and cool trendy things.
· Diverse viewing content: news, TV dramas and movies, variety shows, games/e-sports, animation and music.

This is based on questionaries and in-depth interviews with 4 young users

Needs concluded

This TV needed more flexible placement and diversified content.

Product Goals

Produce a 43-inch rotating TV (ADDFUN TV), which can
· Rotate its hardware (toward horizontal and vertical orientations to adapt to smart phone’s cast and mobile app’s adaptation),
· Present its UI in landscape and portrait views (to fit the hardware),
· Carry 5 modules of content: games, videos, music, fitness, and education.

We will fully realize these three values:

Partner value

· Stimulate consumption: by broadband and TV bundled sales.
· Revenue growth in the razor model: buy TV at a low price and pay to play games.

User value

· More convenient to view short videos by casting them to the rotatable TV.
· Five modules of content is full of entertainment.

Our value

· Product innovation.
· Machine sales + operating income.

Content and Functions

Content

X+N strategy

X refers to the most promoted content modules (combination) of the 5 by our partner, and N is the rest modules. For example, China Telecom wants to focus on its cloud games so it is 1+4. We designed 5 screens that correspond to the 5 modules. The first time the user turns on TV provides choices from the five, while the subsequent turn-ons will directly go to the screen where it was last turned off, and the screen can be switched.

The game screen includes: recommendations, history, categories, themes, game strategies, purchase time and preset apps. In the future there will be social functions. The content of other 4 screens is provided by partners in the field of each screen.

Functions

We use three control methods:

remote control, air mouse (on RC), and gamepad. The gamepad is equipped by default.

Control method alternatives

Hardware rotate modes:

hand mode + auto mode, which can be switched by icons in the status bar.

hand mode: turn off the auto mode and rotate manually each time.

auto mode: TV automatically rotates to the best orientation according to the content being played.

Competitive Analysis

Feedback analysis of TCL XESS Rotating TV’s after-sales users.

After cleaning up the comments on Jingdong, we obtained 50 useful feedbacks, summarized as follows:

Software Differences and Improvements

1. TCL has a specialized portrait-oriented video zone, but which is very inefficient when we browsing it, with quality not guaranteed. We don’t offer such a zone but our 5 modules of content is richer. If there will be a portrait zone, we will pay attention to a friendly navigation and personalized recommendation mechanism.

2. TCL cannot rotate in local media scene, resulting in black padding on left and right, while our most scenes can rotate.

3. TCL has a poor auto rotate experience but which is a technical hurdle as evaluated by our experts, so we enable our users to turn off the auto mode to alleviate this problem.

Information Architecture and Navigation

Information Architecture

We categorized all the preset apps and designed two UI versions-landscape and portrait views-for scenes in demand.

Navigation

The common ways of navigation for content-oriented TV interfaces:

1. The immersive

Advantages: concise and not interruptive, strong visual appeal.
Risks: difficult to ensure the accuracy of recommendations, and no space for operation.
Best for: picture emphasized and no much difference between items, high tolerance for accuracy.

less

small

the biggest

moderate

big

Information per screen:

Content granularity:

less

the most

Advantages: content and operation balanced.
Disadvantages: limited number of themes in each screen-normally 3 or 4.
Best for: fewer items but the content of each item is important.

Advantages: operation friendly, rich contain.
Disadvantages: too much unuseful content, messy interface, degraded user experience.
Best for: big platform with rich items and a large amount of content.

Advantages: see all items at a glance.
Disadvantages: operation unfriendly, display no deeper content.
Best for: independent items and more tool-oriented interfaces.

2. Cards

4. Tabs

3. Themes

Analysis: we need to consider factors such as legibility from a long viewing distance, the amount of items, and their relationship. ADDFUN TV has features of: small size, 2 orientations, 5 modules with much information, and needing enough places for operation.

Interactive prototypes

We decided that the entrances of 5 modules (Screen selection) used the cards, the first screen of each module (Launcher of Game Screen) used the immersive and the rest of it used themes.

* The dark gray background refers to Changhong interfaces, and the dark cyan background refers to China Telecom interfaces.

Conclusions

Social Functions

Since our partner China Telecom wants to add social functions in future iteration so as to increase user engagement, how might we balance UX and R&D costs with limited resources? I came up with two plans: comment and vote, both of which have their pros and cons.

Plan A: Comment

Reason: pre-sales users will love it.
· Comment publishers will get rewards.
· Read-only for beginner players.
· Display as a theme in the game screen.
· Connect with mobile phone to type.
· Need a comment content management system.

Plan B: Vote

Reason: no typing, applicable to TV.
· Can vote only after playing a certain period of time.
· Users who cannot vote will see the result directly while others must vote before seeing it, encouraging participation and avoid blind follow.
· May need ranking lists and personalized recommendation mechanism.
· Whether players can initiate a vote.

Learnings

This is my first time to take charge of the whole machine UI which is customized by our Party A partner. I have had a lot of chances to communicate with the PM, the operation, clients and many more roles. My biggest harvest is that I learned to think more from business level, because this is a typical supply-side project and I believe a good UX designer is more than just the end users’ advocate, but also a team member who finds the best balance between business goals and user desires.

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