Smart TV prototyping

Tools
#1

Hi all. I am currently designing a Smart TV app but I am unable to find a prototyping tool that I can easily create a working prototype using the keyboard to navigate the app and to replicate the experience of using a TV remote D-pad. Does anybody know of a tool on the market that can do this?

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#2

@kev_lex
very interesting post!
Unfortunately I can provide a relevant support.

I never worked on a project for Smart TV and I have some questions:
why do you want to browse the app via keyboard (I guess you are talking about the physical keyboard)?
Is this the right way to develop for such devices?

Please Let keep us posted on it!

Good luck :wink:

#3

Somebody has just asked a question re Smart TVs in a slack channel I’m in and they were pointed towards these links:

May be something useful?

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#4

Hi @kev_lex,

I worked on a Smart TV project about 2 years ago. To be honest I can’t really help with a prototyping tool specifically for Smart TV, but when I did this project I actually used some exiting prototyping methods.

I wish I could share some pics but the project was under an NDA :frowning:. But I can tell you what I used!

  • In the very early stages of design I used paper taped over the TV in the areas my app was going to overlay the broadcast. This helped me to watch a broadcast (e.g. sports game) with the areas covered by my app. I really wanted to see if the places that my overlay was going to appear would interrupt/obscure an important part of the sports match. This was really helpful before going into detailed designs. Maybe only helpful to you if you are designing an overlay app.
  • Then I used a standard InVision clickable prototyping with an iPad (connected by bluetooth to the TV) as the interface instead of a remote. This doesn’t help you much if your specifically looking for something that can prototype the use of the remote. But it does give you the experience of standing in front of the TV and controlling what is happening on the display.
  • At later stages I worked with the developers to test basic designs over the real broadcast. But this takes more time for the developers to build. So you should only do this once you have validated some other things like positioning and general interaction with low fidelity prototypes.

I hope that helped a bit. I’m not sure if it matches your needs. But it’s probably hard to find too many people working on Smart TV stuff so I thought I would add my 2 cents. Happy to talk to you 1-1 if you think it would help :slight_smile:

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#5

Hey @jacquidow Thanks for the links I’ll check them out :)! There may be a golden egg in there somewhere.

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#6

Hey @dee

Thanks for you reply.

There’s obviously a gap in the market for it! (A start up idea!?)

I already use some similar methods to the ones you described. Someone did mention the fact that you can set up key strike interactions in Axure but it’s so complicated it would be easier for me to brush up on my coding ability and build a browser version! lol.

I really want to create these to get some users in and validate ideas before getting dev resource involved if that makes sense. :slight_smile:

Cheers

Kev

#7

This is kind of an old thread, but we use https://flirc.tv/ plus Axure. So that way you can use a TV remote with the interface. It’s not foolproof and some remotes seem to not work smoothly, but when it does work it’s fantastic!

Miriam

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