User Experience of Bravia TV applications

My role

I was the lead researcher for the TV remote redesign initiative. With the initiative from Global Usability testing and user research team, I led end-to-end research across India.

I worked with a designer on global team, a product manager and software engineer in Tokyo, and a marketing team member in the US.

Objective and Goal

Our main objective is to find out the user experience of few Bravia TV applications like Photo Share, YouTube catchup and Easy connectivity. The scope of the study is to find out –

• How do users perform tasks on applications?
• What are the usability issues faced in the process of doing tasks?
• Users general feedback on application-behaviour?
  
  

Research Method 

Focus Groups: This method helped to bring out users’ spontaneous reactions and ideas and let you observe some group dynamics and organizational issues

Participant criteria

We recruited a sample user group who know each other for the test and the main criteria was —

• 9 participants (5 Male and 4 Female)
•  30-45 age group (4 Male and 1 Female) and 20-30 age group (1 Male and 3 Female)
•  Above C class (450K INR) to New Rich (1000K INR)
•  Mixed educational background: non-engineering and engineering background.
•  Multiple device users in a Group (1 Tab user/2smartphone users)

Tasks & Synthesis:

I created tasks primarily based on sharing the content to TV using different ways. The type of way to share the content depend on the type of group and their usage pattern.

The new features were presented to the focus group to let multiple users compare alternative views of a task usually performed on TV applications. Initially, group members were skeptical about these ideas and expressed distrust but after seeing a prototype and scenarios of applications in use, participants moved from scepticism to enthusiasm.

I got all observers (including stakeholders) in the room to go through any finding’s session by session. With the team, I organized findings across all sessions by themes. For this project, as an example, some of the themes included user actions around changing inputs, or problems around specific menu navigation etc.

Impact

After synthesis I put together my findings in a report that I presented to multiple stakeholder teams internally (Product planning/hardware design, software engineering & marketing). The findings I highlighted in the report gave some more direction to the teams on what to do next. I also added recommendations and next steps as part of the report.

Focus group method helped in forming strategic decision and gave clarity around a participant’s behaviours and usual process. Some of the findings were –

• Users wanted favourite folders for each family member in their household
• Users had major problem in connecting their mobile phone to TV
• Majority of the users had issues with the search UI

Disclaimer: To comply with NDAs, I have omitted / obfuscated confidential information in this
project.