The hardware works fine. This isn’t a bug report.
My user experience on a Philips 4K A1 smart TV has been very disappointing. It is functional, and seems stable, but the layout is cluttered and nonsensical (largely not applicable to my preferences) and IMO ugly.
Here, I’ll be a bit more specific… for example, all the buttons are pure white-background horizontal ovals with black outlines. Ugly (in color variety, not shape or orientation), IMO, and worst of all, not customizable.
I’d be willing as a committed user to sit down and choose different colors for different purposes, and would love to remove about 85% of the icons that I would personally never use. I hate being forced to scroll down three or four rows past all of the junk I would prefer to never watch!
So this post is not strictly a trouble report or ask for guidance. It’s merely a user with a long background including in IT with some hopefully useful suggestions for Google developers to parse and use to improve the UI and UE in general.
If you let your users customize their own home screens we will be more loyal, IMO.
Here’s what I propose for Google TV:
Start looking at reducing the use of large portions of the screen in stark white. In a darkened room, the button that has focus looks like a searchlight in my face (it could be 25% darker and still work fine)! Also, given options and contexts, how about splashing some COLORS into the mix? I ask that so sincerely, I could ask PLEASE? again.
I could blab on here about which colors and pastels versus vivids (I like each for their own best uses), but I’m not an interior designer with fixed ideas about such things. I simply want to urge the community to get more into stuff like allowing users to customize our UE (user experience), especially when it pertains to matters that are strictly apart from functionality per se.
You all can easily focus-group the matter of what constitutes “reasonable contrast” and “readability“. The perhaps main “issue” is clutter. Even early graphical UI systems had the trait of automatically hiding icons that were never used after some time period. If mine worked like that, it might look 90% less cluttered already.
I recall using the Opera web browser and finding an extensive library of free THEMES that styled the layout and stuff like borders quite compellingly. None of this affects the functionality; it’s all considered window dressing, but it makes it lovable and hence usable and wanted daily.
You/we can do that sort of thing here, hopefully even better because that was decades ago already. Yahoo.com did a beautiful job of providing extensive personalization of their email interface (long before they were gutted out by the merger and acquisition vultures).
Even basic choices about contrasty versus subtle low-contrast shades of gray [for color-challenged vision users] may help people find what they’re looking for to choose.
One thing I’m definitely NOT seeking is multiple sections of screen populated by, “AI thinks you’ll like this set of shows [that we get paid to pitch to you before you can even watch local news], etc.” Ugh, please stop it!!!
Thanks if you read all the way down here! May the force of better development guide and serve us all!
