Frame TV

My improvement for the Frame TV is to simplify the background customization using an app on your phone. Eliminating Apple TV, Chromecast, etc. and having everything in one spot. From the remote, to customization, it does it all!

Sprint #1

The new Frame TV app allows customization, acts as a remote, and to screen share your phone you can do that from the app or tap the frame of the Frame TV to pair. I want the tapping the frame feature and the app to be compatible across all smart phone types, Apple, Samsung, etc.

Sprint #2

Crazy 8's! 8 sketches in 8 minutes. For my sketches I did some for the remote page, the settings page and the photos page. I also did a sketch for a home page. The image on the right shows the solution sketches. These are the first drawings done for the app. This was definitely early in the process and was me dumping out ideas. One of my settings pages and the menu across the bottom came from an app that me and a group created for a project in a previous semester. I ended up not using either of those ideas.

Sprint #3

The first row of sketches below are more potential solution drawings. These solution sketches are not anything too different from the previous sketches. A new screen that I added is the one with the ‘play’ symbol. This was also taken from the previous group project I did for an app. The ‘play’ represents a video that would be a slow moving picture of waves or something like that and then that would be the home screen of the app. With this hypothetical idea you would open the app and cool slow motion video would just be playing and then the login screen would appear there as well. The second row is a storyboard. The storyboard is directed at the customization aspect of the app. It’s about a lady wanting to change the background on her TV to a family picture. When selecting images a pop-up comes up and asks if you want to display the images as a slideshow. Another customization option is the ‘theme.’ My idea behind the ‘theme’ was to change the app from ‘light mode’ to ‘dark mode’ and vice-versa.

Sprint #4

Sprint four was prototyping! I started out using sketch but I was having issues with my craft plug in and couldn’t get the prototyping preview to work. I ended up switching over and using XD. I have provided some screenshots below as well as a prototype link.

frame tv

As you can see my designs from the previous sketches to the prototype are different. I think what I have going with my prototype is good and is keeping things simple. Some changes that were made were:

• More additions to the remote in the prototype. I think this is a necessary change because I think for a very functional remote there needs to be more controls on there than what I sketched out.
• I like the menu being a hamburger rather than across the bottom. Some of my sketches did include a hamburger menu though.
• Added an apps page. This will be apps that can be used on the TV such as Netflix, Pandora, Hulu and YouTube.
• For the ‘photos’ part or the ‘customization’ I split it into two sections, you can choose from free art or images on your phone.

Pre-Testing

Would I get better results if I build out more pages to my app? Make the prototype more in depth?

The overall idea for this project was I need to focus on my one, very simplified idea which is the background customization of the Frame TV on the app.

For my testing I am thinking of doing an eye-tracking type of thing. I obviously will not be doing anything nearly as intense as a real eye-tracking test but I want to write tasks that will help me understand if I have accomplished my ‘focus’ from above. I want my five testers to walk me through their thought processes and actions as they are trying to follow my tasks so I can understand what they’re doing and what changes need to be made in order to make things better.

Test Results — Sprint #5

I performed a test of my very simple prototype on 5 different participants.

First, I needed to come up with the tasks I wanted them to accomplish. Again, my goal for this app was to simply customize the background for a Frame TV. My three tasks I asked my participants to do were as follows:

1. Change the Frame TV background to a piece of black and white art.
2. Change the Frame TV background to a slideshow of pictures from the camera roll.
3. Change the Frame TV background to a single image from camera roll.

Results and things I learned from my test:

1. On my first test I had the hamburger menu on the login page so it allowed my user to go straight to the menu rather than logging in first. I removed the menu from the login screen for the other tests.
2. Having the ‘select’ button functional in the ‘photos’ and ‘art’ pages would have helped my users in the process. One of my users was so quick to go and select the images that she skipped over the ‘select’ button until the third round because she knew she had done something wrong based off of my reaction when she asked “was that right?” I know that was an error on my end. One of my users just clicked ‘select’ and then ‘set as background’ without clicking the images because they learned it wouldn’t do anything if they tried to select one. Making the images actually selectable as well as making the ‘select’ button functional would have bettered my test. It would have been helpful for the images to be selectable because when they would try and click the pictures and it didn’t work it would have forced them to turn to the select button if they hadn’t done that already.
3. By the last test I mentioned in the intro that not everything is functional so if you click on something and it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not all of my users handled the non working buttons well, I think only one person fully understood the concept that ‘it’s okay if they don’t work, just pretend’. I think it was hard for some people to wrap their heads around the fact that they could just click (even if it didn’t do anything) and explain to me that that is what they would do if it were functional.

Fixing some simple things would have made my test less confusing for my users but I think overall my design was able to accomplish the goal of customizing a Frame TV background easily. This is obviously minus some things not being functional that caused some problems. Something I can improve on when giving tests is not answering questions or reacting if they do something wrong or not like I wanted or expected. I should have told my users not to ask questions, just to do the tasks and I was there to observe.

Below is the link for my newest version of the Frame TV app prototype.

XD Link: https://xd.adobe.com/view/b59d946d-f425-4fd1-7941-ad6fdb8e4b6e-c3ac/