Presented by Jason Grigsby.

88% of tablet owners and 86% of smartphone owners use their device while watching TV.

Xbox 360 […] is used more for watching movies and TV shows […] than playing video games online. — LA Times, March 2012

  • Xbox SmartGlass is a digital companion to television content (e.g. a Game of Thrones map to follow along with the onscreen action).
  • 2013 model televisions compare incredibly well to an iPhone 4S running iOS6 in the HTML5 Test.
  • Apple’s Remote app makes interacting with controls on a television tolerable, but not perfect.

Designing for the 10-foot UI

  • Make up, down, left, and right directions very clear
  • Designs tend to be more grid-based.
  • Tweaking spatial navigation for TV browsing from Opera.
  • Google TV jQuery UI Lib Reference — doesn’t work very well on many televisions and recommends replacing anchor elements with <div>. Chrome on Google TV was previously owned by a different business unit but has recently been taken over by the Chrome core team.
  • TV browsers send d-pad controls as arrow key events (can be hooked in to with JavaScript).
  • At the moment, device detection is the best method for attempting to detect a television-based browsers. Admittedly, this sucks, but there are no other options until television manufacturers provide a more interoperable experience.
  • Xbox One can switch instantaneously between live TV, games, movies, music, and other apps.
  • You Can’t Detect a Touch Screen

Input methods are dynamic and transient.

Every desktop UI should be designed for touch now. — Josh Clark

  • Progressive enhancement was built around the notion that better browsers get a better experience. But, who are we to judge who has the better input? Is a virtual keyboard inherently better or worse than a physical keyboard? What role does context or current circumstance play in this? We need to learn to adapt!
  • TVs may suck right now, but it’d be dangerous to dismiss them.

We can’t predict future behavior from current experiences that suck.