In 2010 L4 Media contacted me to work on a project that they were working on called Panorama. Panorama was designed for IPTV and television service providers who want to make it easy for consumers to access personalized content, like Twitter and Facebook updates, weather forecasts, and sports scores, directly from their televisions. L4 Media was working with Nokia Siemens Networks to build out a prototype that would be unveiled at TelcoTV 2010. They wanted to build a flexible experience that worked with a variety of different providers on a 10ft experience. Unlike other widget platforms in the market at the time, Panorama was the only television widget platform that was architected from inception to incorporate mobile phone integration, social networking features, and unique revenue-generation capabilities.
“We are launching L4 Media to enable people to discover content and interact with each other while watching TV,” Brandon Albers, L4 Media Founder and CTO.
My role was to work the L4 to design screens that would serve as a visual guide for the project. L4 was building a prototype for TelcoTV 2010 and wanted me to work with the team to define what the experience would look like. I provided sketches, wireframes and high fidelity designs for the team. We needed to build out an experience that included navigation and installation of widgets along with viewing of those widgets in an expanded experience. Widgets had a couple of forms including fully expanded and minimized. This would allow users to both be fully engaged with the widget and also have an experience that allowed them to watch Tv with the widget running at the same time.
The primary challenge was working with the team on a concept that was fairly new at the time. This concept of an embedded internet connected 10ft experience was fairly new at the time and was only available through large media centers and gaming experiences. I had to work with the L4 team and CTO to ensure that we were being as un intrusive to the viewing experience as possible but also providing value from the widgets at the same time. I had never worked with the 10ft experience before and it was great to get involved with new user inputs other than a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen.
We needed to provide users with expanded views on the widgets when opened. The widgets were fully customizable and the user could navigate within the widgets with their remote.
This was a completely new experience for me at the time and I learned a fair amount about the 10 ft experience. I learned about viewing artifacts like fonts and icons from an average distance on a large screen. I learned about acceptable white and black levels on a television as well. This was a journey into new technology and the time and I learned a lot from just trial and error as well.
