I spent a bit of time recently playing with Google TV. As I have documented before, I am a cord-cutter - I primarily watch video via Netflix on a Samsung Bluray player and via over-the-air broadcast TV. So while Google TV is capable of bringing together both Cable/Satellite content and online content together to the TV, in my experiments I only had access to the online conent. This took away a bit of shine from Google TV, but the experience was meaty enough to extract some useful product improvement lessons.
Google TV is the first (?) "mainstream" attempt to get professional and amateur (user-generated) content from disparate sources, including Cable/Satellite, onto the best screen in the house. However Google needs to simplify the interface to make it accessible to the the lay audience. I lay out some problem areas and potential solutions below.
Unified experience: Google TV sits on top of multimedia content from a huge number of unrelated websites. Whenever a user navigates to a web-site via search or via one of the "applications" on Google TV, they are presented with an experience that is likely different from what they saw on a previously visited web-site. Such a difference in experience from web-site to web-site is pardonable when one is on the computer, but on a TV consumers are used to a somewhat more seemless experience - the user experience doesn't change much when a consumer switches channels. At some level, switching between web-sites is like swithcing between channels, but the experience on Google TV is nowhere near as uniform. One way to solve this problem is by imposing a certain presentation on all web-sites. Another is to encourage multimedia web-sites to use the same uniform design template. Recent news from Google TV suggests that they are going down the latter path.
Fewer metaphors: Google TV has a notion of bookmarks (similar to bookmarks in a web browser) and that of a queue (similar to a Netflix queue). For the lay TV watcher, having both metaphors together on a single platform requires more thought and comprehension than the user may want to deal with. Perhaps a single metaphor would be less confusing and therefore more appealing to the lay user.
More relevant search results: Searching for "Rudy" on Google TV lists "Girlfriends", "Fired Up" and "Garrison's Gorrillas" as completion suggests. Clicking the search shows these titles as search results along with "American Logger" and "Rudy" the movie. Only "American Logger" - which has a character/participant by the name Rudy Pelletier - has an obvious connection to my search keyword (besides Rudy the movie). Netflix's results by comparison (see post on this here) seem more satisfying. Netflix obviously has an easier problem than Google TV - since the former only deals with professional content. Even, so Google needs to solve the search problem well to make search useful. One potential solution is to recognize the likely intent of the user and to prioritize results with certain characteristics over others. For example, in the case of Rudy, the Google TV search engine knows that Rudy is a professionally produced movie. Thus Rudy (the movie) should likely be the first result for the search and the first completion suggestion. Similarly on encountering a search term such as "NFL Raiders", the search engine can intuit that the user is looking for the football team Oakland Raiders and return any live or recently concluded games as the first result. Intuiting intent in this manner is difficult but between mining previous queries across Google TV users, the user's history and attributes associated with a returned result (ie. attribute "movie" associated with movie Rudy), it ought to be possible.
Better remote: Most TV remotes are too complex to begin with - too many buttons, un-intuitive modes, hard to read text (in low light) and the like. Even so most people are used to the form factor and to one handed operation of the remote while watching TV. The Google TV remote that I used (from Logitech) was a full-on keyboard. While this may be work for those coming to the TV to browse web content meant to be consumed on PCs, it doesn't quite work for the lay user wanting to watch TV. To make matters worse, the heavy use buttons from a regular TV remote are not that easy to find on the keyboard. For example, the mute button is at the top left of the keyboard. Far away from the up/down navigation pad on the right hand side of the keyboard. For a right handed user, used to operating the a TV remote with just the right hand, the mute button is simply too far away from the right thumb. Either Google TV hardware vendors need to rethink the form factor of the remote, or they need to make a portion of the keyboard remote look like a regular TV remote.
Google TV has a lot of promise as a platform that can unify all forms of multimedia consumption on to the big screen in the house. However, Google TV needs to get over the usability challenge before it can fulfill that promise.
Related articles
- Netflix's response to headwinds - become ubiquitous (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)
- TV today: way too complicated (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)
- How does Yahoo! Connected TV fit in the new TV world? (hitechenergy.blogspot.com)
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