- Freeview Australia
Engaging people through smart TV
FreeviewPlus is an Australian television service delivered via broadband, providing Freeview’s digital content inside a state of the art EPG (TV Guide), with seamless access to Catch Up TV across the Freeview networks.
You can access the FreeviewPlus app by just pressing the green button on your remote control.
The Challenge
Building on the original app’s intuitive user experience, inside a restrictive platform.
Following the success of the Freeview FV app for iOS and Android, we were asked to design the UI/Ux (user interface and user experience) for a new Freeview Plus TV app.
TV apps present a unique challenge, as their remotes usually offer a simple d-pad for interaction – quite unlike the powerful multi-touch interfaces enjoyed by most mobile users.
Freeview Plus is built on a technology platform called ‘Hybrid broadcast broadband Television’ (HbbTV, or Hybrid TV for short).
Technical limitations in the HTML and CSS code of the HbbTV platform restrict the range of transitions and animations available
The End Results
Extensive user research and optimised controls delivered an intuitive user experience.
User feedback from our first Freeview app helped us design the new interface more appealingly, using visual carousels. Building on the intuitive mobile app that everyone loved – we helped create an engaging, smart TV experience.
Restricting the d-pad’s side movement and letting the content flow was crucial for creating an accessible, intuitive experience – especially on the TV guide, where it would have been easy to create an experience in which the user was overwhelmed with information, had to scroll laboriously and felt lost.
The expertise that made a difference in this project:
