10 Foot Experience
challenge
This assignment was an exercise in interaction design to create a 10 foot experience. The requirements of the experience were that the design had to include the following:
Grid view of TV and/or movie content
Each item needed to include: a screenshot thumbnail, name, user rating, running time (or episode count) and
year made. Grid view should allow for more items to be on screen at once
Single column view of TV and/or movie content
All of the items needed to include the data from the grid view as well as an expanded screenshot or image series, brief summary, top billed cast/crew, and a similar tv/film list
A controller for the interface design to view content
The requirements were to provide way to navigate through the menus/interface, and control the streaming content. Beyond that, what explicit functionality the controller does or doesn’t do is up to you
My Role
My role in this project was to design the interface to include all of the required information from the assignment and ensure that content could be viewed easily. I was asked to explore the content-level view to show when “a user has selected a category and the display is now showing all of the content for that category.”
Process
Since this project was meant to be an exercise in interaction explorations, assumptions were made that as a designer, we already had the correct requirements and information needed to move forward with the interaction designs. The overall process was to iterate on wireframes, submit to our class cohort to review and provide feedback. Then, we revised our designs based on the feedback and presented final designs based on the feedback. Part of the assignment was to annotate the designs and be able to clearly explain our rationale for our design decisions.
final design
User feedback was incorporated directly into the designs to improve on areas that users found confusing. We also tried to create stronger visual language throughout the design so users could easily understand the differences between Lists, Reminders and Categories. The wireframes and notes below outline further details on the improvements.
Lessons Learned
This assignment posed many challenges and I learned the following important insights:
Designing for a 10 foot experience is hard!
It is a fine line between too much content on the screen and too little content where the user has to go back and for constantly
Content needs to be clear and visible from far away
Content needs to be within 1-3 clicks on a controller so it’s not a frustrating experience
You have to prototype and play with an experience like this in order to really get it right
While I still think this design could use more work and tweaking, it was a great exercise in laying out information and thinking about how users would need to both navigate and consume the information at the same time