Controlling Smart TVs Using Touch Gestures on Mobile Devices

The global TV market has experienced significant changes in its market landscape, and the Smart TV market is growing fast. However, a traditional TV remote is not suitable for interacting with many Smart TV applications, this is particularly true when typing text is necessary, such as searching, browsing, and using social applications. On the other hand, increasingly pervasive mobile devices, such as smartphones, are emerging as an interesting platform for TV interactions given their intuitive input and output modalities. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new design of Second-Screen Smart TV control app, S3TV, for personal mobile devices. We focus on how to reduce visual attention shifting by leveraging touch gesture controls, tailored for personal mobile devices. We conducted comprehensive user studies, subjective usability analysis, objective interaction analysis, and comparative studies against a soft button based control app. The subjective usability analysis showed the prototype achieved a System Usability Score (SUS) of 80.21, well above the average score of 70.12. In addition, the objective interaction analysis confirmed high task success rates and correct action sequences, and touch gesture controls were preferred over hard system keys. Compared to de facto soft button-based control approach, S3TV reduced visual attention shifting and operation delay with improved user experience. Overall the participants reported that they felt satisfied and would like to continue to use S3TV.