Smart Enough for the Web? A Responsive Web Design Approach to Enhancing the User Web Browsing Experience on Smart TVs

Smart TV devices have become a commodity in the past few years, enhancing the television (TV) with an array of new features, providing capabilities of Internet connection and computer/mobile-like abilities. However, most websites are not designed with the smart TV experience in mind, and usability problems arise when websites are viewed and interacted with on a TV device. To solve this challenge, we propose the use of responsive web design, a method that has become a standard in mobile devices, saving the need of developing custom TV-specific websites or Apps. We tested the current usability of a typical “desktop” website on the smart TV, and compared it to an alternative version of the same site but with our proposed responsive techniques being applied. Results provided an indication of improved usability and likeability by using our “TV-responsive” method compared to the nonresponsive one. However, while our TV-responsive website had a higher usability score, the differences were not statistically significant, with the exception of the usability on the ease of scrolling and most measured task completion times.