ICTV Interfaces
Here you will see some of the interfaces that were developed in the first half of the 1990s for ICTV's Interactive TV platform. Developing these interfaces was not simply an exercise in User Interface (UI) design as it required working with the hardware and software teams to provide the necessary functionality to allow these interfaces to come to fruition. The on-screen experience you see in the examples below was controlled by a relatively basic TV remote control which means there were even less navigation buttons and options then is found in today's mobile phones.
Above you will find ICTV's Video Application Interface. The challenge facing the team was that we needed the application to look and feel like TV as the user would get to this site by merely changing the channel. However, we needed time to load all of the game information so the user could make their selection. We bought time with a video fly-in that led the user to arcade selector. We dealt with the issues of frame matching by having the little explosion at the end of the fly-in. Once the game was selected we bought more time to load the game by having a fly-in to the Pin or Authentication screen.
Above is an example of ICTV's Shopping Application Interface. Here again is an interface that had to look like TV and was controlled by a slightly souped up TV remote control with only up, down, left, right and enter buttons added to the features one would have expected to see on their remote control in the early 1990s.