User Experience Design Challenges and Guidelines for Next Generation TV User Experiences

High fidelity TVs, powerful set-top boxes, and hi-speed Internet are all enabling new TV viewing experiences. This phenomenon has spread to not just the physical viewing experience but also to the softer side of content in terms of new content, service delivery mechanisms and also new applications such as content on demand and interactivity with media and friends. TV enthusiasts now have access to traditional television content as well as Internet content, such as online videos, email, weather, traffic, and much more. This paper is about the challenges we face as design researchers in the area of designing and deploying next generation user experiences for TV especially from an applied research standpoint. When moderating a series of focus groups to investigate user opinion about a set of future use cases some generic problems were discovered. We were also researching to identify further opportunities for research in the next generation TV user experience design. The focus groups were conducted using scenarios which embedded certain abstract design proposals for future experiences. The findings helped the team identify some of the challenges with design of TV user experiences and some potential guidelines to address the challenges.