This is one of my favorite projects. My colleague and I were working on another project during the second semester. After a long day, we decided to watch a movie for inspiration. My friend used his smart TV to search for the movie „Bladerunner“. The only problem was that it was super frustrating to type in the letters with a normal remote control. And this was the point where we asked ourselves: our TVs became so much smarter and faster over the years, why not the remote?
Fortunately, our lecturer had a friend, who worked at LOEWE in Munich. His name was Jan König and he is the lead designer UX/UI at LOEWE. We contacted him and told him about our idea. He loved it and asked us to visit him in Munich for an interview. A few weeks later we traveled to LOEWE and talked with him. It was a great experience and we gained a lot of insights for our project. To be clear this was not a cooperation, however, Jan and LOEWE supported us with monthly feedback and with a TV for the exhibition but the idea, concept, and prototype came all from us. We are very thankful for the enourmes feedback from Jan and LOEWE. And so the project called “Steuerung 7” was born.
The first step was the research. It was very important for me to stay as near to the user as possible. That’s why we examine different smart TV’s to discover the strengths and weaknesses. After a lot of surveys, interviews and user journeys we gained enough insights to build our first prototype. We defined our target group and with the feedback of Jan, we developed more prototypes. Honestly, I don’t know how much interface scribbles we created for this project. After all, the design process is always iterating. Our aim was simply perfection in every detail. We wanted to make the remote more personal for the user. That’s why we created personal profiles where you could save your preferences. With a fingerprint scanner that is built into the remote, the remote can identify you and adjusts the TV like you wanted him to be. A small but cool feature.
After all the use cases, mood boards and scribbles we created a style guide. In order to that, we developed our own and unique Icon family. With the style guide, we designed the final screens for the interface.
Although the focus was always on the remote interface, we decided to create also a haptic prototype. We did that because we simply wanted to do it. It was extra work but also a lot of fun. I’m not really into product design, but we asked ourselves how could a future remote control look like and how would you use it? The whole thing was a little adventure, and we learned a lot about material and product design in general.
In addition to the remote interface, we developed a similar interface for the smart TV itself. The question was, what happens on the TV while you use the remote. Because all the interactions were now on the remote we decided to try something new on the TV.
After all the concepts the next step was the finalization. With after effects, we created two different movies. One for the remote interface and one for the TV interface. While doing that we learned a lot about transitions and after effects in general. At the exhibition, we used the LOEWE TV and a second screen to display both interfaces. In addition to that, we build a final haptic prototype and a custom-made exhibition stand.
This project was amazing. I learned so much about the most different things. The idea to try something completely different is oddly satisfying. Also, creating a haptic prototype was very interesting. But it wasn’t all great. Because we wanted to show as many functions as possible and had the desire to create a perfect user experience, we worked all the time. Honestly, now looking back on this project I would say that we wanted way too much. Last two months we worked literally every second. But it was also worth it. I am proud of that project and hope you like it as well.
- Interaction Design 3. Semester, SoSe 2017
- Application Design 1 by Jürgen Gräf
- Group members: Constantin Casper, Stefan vom Bruck
- Doku_Application_Stefan.VB_Constantin2
