Samsung Smart View
Creating a cohesive experience across a households’ content and devices
Samsung released a major redesign of the Tizen TV OS, Smart Hub. The redesign created a disjointed experience within the ecosystem of Samsung's home products. Samsung's Smart View, the TV's companion app, no longer aligned to customers expectations and the needs of the business. The Smart View mobile app functionality and design diverged from the TV, primary features were sparingly used, and with the rise of internet connected TVs and streaming on mobile, customers expected so much more.
I was asked define a UX strategy to align the Smart View mobile app across Samsungs home product lines with Product and R&D teams in Korea. Also the mobile app needed a redesign to have consistent discovery and watch experience with Samsung TVs.
To kickoff this project, our design team organized a week long UX summit. Were the design leads for each home product ran a workshop with Service business, advanced R&D, and global design teams from Korea. I facilitated a mobile workshop, and gathered the teams input and ran brainstorms figuring out what the Smart View app could look like in the next 3-5 years.
After the workshop, I had follow-up sessions for the next few weeks with the mobile team to finalize the strategy. We established a clear vision to transform the mobile app into a central hub. This would make users' life easier and more efficient when interacting with their content.
Next, I started defining key users tasks like finding something new to watch, or resume watching their show. Based on those tasks, I explored three ideas for the home screen centered around personalization.
"Model 3 seems closer to the TV's layout. I prefer the way the app tiles are fixed at the top for quick access, rather than having to randomly scroll down to find the app row."
I learned that we didn’t have the machine learning (ML) infrastructure built to scale in order to support personalized recommendations. Also the ML team was still growing and wasn't ready to tackle this huge ask at this time. We had to make tradeoffs on the “ideal design” vs. what we can actually execute in the timeframes.
After narrowing on a design direction based on these constraints, I shared at a high-level how the designs could evolve. This was to help envision how to the approach the roadmap and reach personalized features in a phased and iterative approach.
My Smart View designs influenced two Samsung product lines. Both the TV and Audio teams used the app designs to enhance and manage their content experiences. I worked closely with the Product Design Leads for each product and advocated for a consistent UI framework. I delivered the design foundation for content browsing, search, and device control across Samsung’s Home products.
Streaming hours
MAUs
Now that the design foundation is established, Samsung will continue to iterate and move forward to the next phase:
