I recently had the opportunity to design an EPG interface for a television set-top box. To me this was an interesting departure from my day to day work in e-commerce, social media and application design; a chance to look at the world from a different perspective.
When the design was complete, the technical director of the project seemed genuinely surprised that I had understood and adapted to the peculiarities of the EPG, and had designed a user interface that was both intuitive and technically correct. Not bad for a web designer.
He'd worked with many web designers in the past who had attempted to translate their UI design principals to the television screen, and had failed miserably; Delivering a web experience that was neither practical nor technically possible on a television.
The World Wide Web is just one medium that I work with, and I am particularly good at it. But design, for me, is universal. It is about finding a balance between something over which you have no control, and something over which you have no limitation.
On one side you have the immovable truth: The problem, the business objective, the strategy - whatever it happens to be. On the other, you have possibility - a blank canvas. What you put into this space, in order to answer, solve or fulfill the immovable truth, is Design.
Televisions and EPGs have some immovable truths:
- They are generally navigated with a remote control, using directional arrows
- They don't have a cursor
- Anamorphic HD will be squeezed into a Standard Definition screen, losing resolution
- There are 'safe areas' to observe, in order to avoid having your interface cropped
- Televisions don't handle certain colours particularly well
Some might see these as obstacles, but I see them as truths; Neither negative or positive. It's just the way things are, and I have to work around them. I have to design an intuitive and engaging user interface around these truths.
I avoided problematic colours in situations where they might bleed. I used fonts and type-sizes that would shrink gracefully and still be legible when reduced to Standard Definition. I created a grid that respected the 'safe areas' and didn't put anything important close to the edges. I included 'on focus' styling so that the user could see which button they were on, without relying on a mouse-cursor to tell them.
In my world, Design is about solving problems and answering questions. Good Design is about solving problems in new and interesting ways. Great Design is about taking those fundamental principals and applying them to any given problem, regardless of the discipline or medium.
