Samsung Smart TV

Netflix Login Page

Over spring break, my dad decided to buy a new television for our living room, so he bought a Samsung SmartTV.  With the SmartTV, he can watch Netflix, Pandora and Amazon Video on the TV with no devices needing to be connected.  I offered to log on to all of these services for my dad and I quickly found poor usability design on the login pages for the TV.  On the first page of the TV, it asks you to put in the WiFi password.  The keyboard that was given was laid out in alphabetical order.  Although this went against my conceptual model of a keyboard, it was pretty simple to figure out once I understood the layout.  Then, I moved onto the Netflix application and I noticed a lot of problems with the login page.  First, the layout of the Netflix page said enter your email above the keyboard but once you started typing in your email it only said Password on the right underneath the box.  Therefore, when I first started typing, I just looked to the right and I saw password and thought that they were asking for the password first.  This went against my conceptual model so I knew that I was making an error.  The reason why I had this problem was because of the proximity of password to the box I was typing into.  The word password is closer to the box then the "Enter your email address" which is why I faced a problem.  This is also an example of Garbage in, Garbage out because the information that I entered was garbage because of a poor design of the input.  The system also did not have forgiveness because after I realized my error, I had to repeatedly click the back button to delete each character instead of just being able to clear all.  Overall, the design of inputting your information into the SmartTV had poor design.

In order to fix some of these problems, I would just ensure that there is consistency and proximity used throughout the whole television setup.  All keyboards and inputs for every application should have a similar look and they should match the user's conceptual model.  I think either a QWERTY keyboard or an alphabetical keyboard would work but it should be consistent throughout.  Also, there should be labels for each box that should use the principle of proximity so the user knows what they are filling in.  Overall, the design has an easy fix and it could be greatly improved.