User Experience with Remote Controls for TV Navigation and Control.

My team and I had previously done an experience audit of our TVs in the field and talked to users about their experience with the TV. One of the findings from a high level included frustrations with using the TV remote – there was confusion around using the TV remote control buttons as well as difficulties around navigating menus on the TV.

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

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 efforts to convince our stakeholders in Tokyo that a remote-control redesign should be included as part of our TV roadmap. 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.

Initial approach

As a first step, I formed a working group with the designer on my team to gather existing information and do some secondary research. This involved reaching out to the log analytics team to get an idea of remote-control key use, getting in touch with the support center team to pull out remote control relevant call info, reviewing past research, and documenting how the competitor TV remotes and interfaces are designed.

We then presented the case to the product planning and software engineering teams in Tokyo around why this was a problem we needed to solve.

• From a business perspective, our customers were not using the TV remote, which meant a lot of the TV features went unused /undiscovered – and they were just using the TV as a monitor.
• From the users’ perspective, the remote and accompanying interface had problems that interfered with their overall TV watching experience. and the increased frustration and taking us away from our goal of delivering shared family experiences at home.

Goals

Once I had stakeholder buy-in, I met with the stakeholders to discuss what we needed to find out to give us some direction. As a first step, we decided that we needed a deeper understanding of current user problems with TV interaction. We had three main questions.

• What problems do they have with their current process and more specifically around
  remote-control use? (e.g. Key layout, available buttons, key clutter etc.)
• In which situations are users picking up another remote and why? (were there any missing
  keys? Inadequate control of other devices?)
• What is the experience around performing core activities – general navigation, changing
  inputs, and accessing settings on the TV?

Participant sample and recruiting

We had specific criteria for our participant sample. Some of these included:

• Specific TV model owners (models that the remote design change will impact)
• Sony TV in the living / family room and used as the main TV by everyone at home
• Watch 10 or more hours of Live TV and Streaming apps (Netflix/Amazon etc.)
• 2 or more member households
• Mix of age ranges (25 – 60)
• I sourced participants through a list of volunteers from our CRM database who had opted-in for
  research.

Research method

I decided to break this down into two phases:

• 1:1 interview in users’ homes in phase 1
• A follow up survey to get feedback from a wider audience in phase 2.

Interviews:

I decided on interviews for of a couple of reasons. The research goals called for some exploratory and some evaluative questions, I could do this best by talking to users. I also wanted to do this in users’ homes because a big part of what I really wanted to understand was the context. i.e.

•  How are people using the TV with other devices?
•  Where do people keep their remotes?
•  How many remotes are they using?
•  Who else uses the remote at home?

My goals here were to:

Validate our findings from the Indian market.

Understand if there were any regional differences in RC use.

I led the interviews in India, and the same test happened in multiple locations worldwide – Germany, US, and UK.

Synthesis

My process after each session is to have a mini-debrief with any observers to recap the session, highlight key issues/takeaways, surprises. I have noticed that this really helps any stakeholders especially from Tokyo to clarify what they felt happened and helps me get everyone on the same page.

This also helps us build toward the larger synthesis that I do when the sessions are completed. For the larger debrief session, I usually have interview recordings on my PC connected to the TV and we can quickly scroll through to clarify things if needed.

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.

The participatory design sketches also gave us rich insights into the keys and key layout users valued having on the remote, and on some occasions the shape of the remote too. I analysed survey responses and open-ended text by tagging and categorizing user feedback. I presented this data as histograms to provide a big picture visual view of the data.

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.

High level findings from the research were around both Remote control hardware (and by that, I mean the keys on the remote and layout) and complexities in TV menus. These included:

• Users just want all their AV devices to work together seamlessly.
• They want easy access to the most commonly access functions on the TV (like picture settings, Wi-Fi settings etc.) and not have to dig through menus.
• They want to be able to customize these settings, their home screen etc. a one size fits all approach does not really work for everyone.