Investigating personalisation when designing remote controls for Smart TV

Abstract

TV technology has taken on more smart features and functionality to provide an even better TV viewing experience. Despite having more features, users fall in the habit of using the same functionalities daily and make less use of the more smart features it offers. Traditional remote controls can limit the user from exploring the system and making it more personalised and customized to their liking. This study aims to make use of some of the smart features the technology offers as well as providing a remote with intuitive controls to enrich the user experience when watching TV. It explores two particular domains, a remote with adaptive user interface, and providing more information based on the current context. The remote runs on a smart mobile device to provide a more personal interaction between the user and the smart TV. A prototype of the remote running on Android was developed to approach the problem. The remote controls Kodi, a media center application, to allow the user to simulate their environment when watching TV. Three case studies were presented to the users to test and give feedback on the system. The case studies focus on movies, football sports and music content. The experiment was run on Windows to simulate a TV environment due to technical limitations on smart TV. Firebase is used for the backend and a server implemented in java was run on Windows. Statistical methods in SPSS and text analysis using Dedoose were used to evaluate the results. The experiment was carried out by fifty participants who answered a pre-study and a post-study online questionnaire and used the system. Evaluating the results, the study achieved satisfactory results when investigating personalisation in designing remote controls for smart TV. The remote solves a number of problems that users have with their current remote controls and proposes an adaptive user interface to personalise the interaction between the user and the smart TV.