UX Improve #1 Improving the user experience of LG SMART TV and LG MAGIC REMOTE
By: Egor Kartavenko
Tags: LG, UI, TV, Online Cinema, UX

UX Improve #1 Improving the user experience of LG SMART TV and LG MAGIC REMOTE

UX Improve articles focus on improving the user experience and interface of apps and things that people use daily. Egor Kartavenko Mar 14, 2020·4 min read

LG SMART TV

Today I will describe, in my opinion, a fairly rare, but interesting user scenario of the LG SMART TV application, which I encountered when I bought an LG TV from a stand.

UX designer can’t sleep. Taken from Google.

Input data

Device: LG 49UK6450

App: LG Smart TV

About two users who encountered a problem

Yegor Kartavenko, 24 years old. UI / UX designer. A loyal customer of LG.

Usage context: at home, late at night, before going to bed.

What’s important: watch movies in the ivi or megogo app with comfortable brightness and backlight settings. Enable the shutdown timer for 60 minutes.

Barriers: unwillingness to understand the application interface to set the correct settings.

Lyubov Guselnikova, 24 years old. Psychologist. There is no loyalty to specific TV brands.

Usage context: at home, late at night, before going to bed.

What’s important: watch a movie and fall asleep.

Barriers: in working with LG interfaces, I completely depend on Egor, because it is difficult for me to understand the application.

Problem 1. Home/store mode.

When I bought a TV from the stand, I was not aware of the existence of the “home/store mode” function. In my case, the mode was set to the “in-store” option. This option, as I learned after 3 months of using the TV, allows store sellers to demonstrate the functionality of the device to customers, or, as indicated in the settings, it optimizes the TV settings for the store.

Home/Store Mode

I got used to my second LG TV, which was purchased from a warehouse, not a stand, and tried to set the power-saving mode level to the maximum, thereby reducing the brightness and getting a comfortable viewing of movies before going to bed. After 10 minutes of setting the desired screen brightness settings, the app automatically resets them to their original settings, meaning, in my case, it returns a high screen brightness. At night, when you are almost asleep, it is unpleasant enough.

Solution to problem 1.

Given my scenario in which I encounter this problem precisely when using the ivi and megogo apps, I tried to find out a painless way for the brand to eliminate this experience from their product.

By clicking on the “Focus” button on the remote, I learned that the LG SMART TV app supports pop-UPS when using external apps. Thus, the solution to the problem itself became obvious: we create a pop-up window that notifies the user that the “store Mode” function is working for them and specify how to disable it.



Why this decision: LG will not notify the user every time immediately after turning on the TV that it costs “in-store Mode”. This would be very confusing for many users.

Solution for problem 1.

Problem 2. The simulation mode the mouse (Air Mouse) to Lg Magic Remote.

LG Magic Remote

This is my first TV with a remote control that allows you to simulate the operation of a computer mouse. It is, in general, a good product that improves the user experience when using LG TV. However, it has a rather unpleasant problem. Mouse simulation is enabled when scrolling the wheel and when the user uses the remote control in bed or on the sofa, the remote control and its wheel may be under the elbow, leg or back and scroll while watching a movie, then you have to wait for the cinema interface to disappear.

The issue

Or, for example, the user wants to pause the movie. Then you will have to click on the wheel, and if the user accidentally scrolls it, the mouse mode will turn on, which will not allow you to just click on the pause button. In this situation, I intuitively want to click on the arrows under the wheel to select the desired interface element faster. In applications such as online cinemas, this scrolling is not really necessary for me, as the interface of cinemas is well thought out, but the function does help in some cases, for example, when you are looking for a movie to watch.

The solution to problem 2.

There are two painless options.

The first is to disable the mouse function when watching movies in online cinemas. However, this may cause discomfort for users who are already used to this feature.

The second is to make a dead zone in one scroll of the wheel when watching a movie in an online theater or other places with a related problem. In this case, the negative consequences for me are not obvious.

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LG team, thank you for the beautiful TV, I really like it and I’m glad that I use it. If you see this article, I would like to point out that writing is only motivated by a desire to improve the product that I use every day.

Thank you for reading to the end!