Home > Assertahome iDTV
Not content with a web offering, Asserta were keen to give those with less web experience a chance to view their affiliates properties.
A stand alone interactive digital television (iDTV) service was conceived, which also offered the ability to log in to any personal information that had been created on the website.
Because of the limitations of the 'Liberate' iDTV platform, the architecture of the website had to be streamlined and simplified to enable it to successfully operate.
The difficulty in using the add on keyboard or the remote control to navigate and type meant that text input fields had to be kept to a minimum.
Design also needed to be thought out carefully. Vivid strongly saturated colours were unsuitable for television, and caused serious visual disturbances, rendering any information useless.
All colours had to be optimised, usually by taking about 20% off the saturation in PhotoShop. Even when that was done we still had to test the colour on an actual television set.
Also as pixels on a TV screen are not quite square, so all graphics had to be stretched vertically by exactly 109.4%. We tested 110% and 109%, but both made vast differences.
The format of the graphic made a difference too. GIFs were processed much faster than JPEGs on a set top box (STB).
Because of this and other limitations on graphic sizes, we chose to produce a design that relied heavily on coloured table cells.
For testing purposes we had two TV sets - a top of the range 30 inch flatscreen and an old 24 inch set.
These provided us with the ability to test numerous colour combinations and graphic treatments, as well as being able to test the site's architecture.
iDTV design proccess
