LIVE TV - Mo Selim

The VIDAA Live TV application was the most fully featured and innovative TV watching experience available upon release. It provided a rich fluid feature set that towered over the competition.

My Role

Manager of Product Design, Product Owner, Project Lead, Interaction Design Contributor

The Challenge

The Goal

Hisense's original Live TV application was difficult to use and overly complicated. It was paired with a confusing remote control that scared away casual TV users. The Live TV experience (at the time) was the most important feature and directly impacted sales. We were asked to turn things around.

To completely redesigned the Live TV application and provide a very focused experience with rich and powerful functionality that always remaining true to the classic simple passive nature of Live TV.

The Design

The Live TV app needed to satisfy TV users making the transition to Smart TVs and at the same time appeal to tech savvy users that could appreciate enhanced features.

This lead me to create a design that could work for both. By simplifying the remote control and including a Live TV button, I could ensure that a user could easily have the same experience as they had prior to the smart TV if that is what they desired.

And for the tech savvy bunch, I included a wealth of valuable and innovative functions that were easily accessible using a simple remote with a DPAD.

Here is a small sample of pages from my initial Interaction Design Specification.

Operated with the industry's simplest remote control, and a very easy to navigate UI, the VIDAA Live TV experience allowed the watcher to effortlessly move through favorite programs and channels while still having access to rich metadata and a powerful guide.

Shown here is a small sample of the visual design created under my guidance and based on my interaction design specifications.

The original release in China was an astounding success. Within month it had sold 8 million units and the Live TV app became China's most used Smart TV application.

For the subsequent North American release, I had to refactor the Live TV application to work with significantly less metadata than available in China, yet still deliver an equivalently rich and engaging experience.

I provided scripts and workflows that were used to help drive marketing campaigns as well as all promotional material.

The Result

Our Live TV application has been included in over 20 million televisions. It has won many awards since it's release and is responsible for billions of hours of lean back bliss.