Our guest post today is from a company we’ve written about before on this blog: Clicker.tv. You can read here what’s written about them by much more august publications such as Wired, Fast Company and the Washington Post. In a world of more and more video, discovery becomes the issue. There’s great stuff out there, I know there is…but how do I find it? Clicker provides the complete programming guide for the new era of Internet TV. They catalog all the premium TV shows, movies, Web series, live events and music videos available on the Web in one seamless, organized experience so viewers can easily discover what’s available to watch, where to watch it and share what’s worth watching online from their iPhone or Android devices.

As the way our web is designed continues to shift and grow, among the most profound changes right now is designing for an Internet that’s 10 feet away: the television screen. With set-top boxes Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, and Google TV plus TVs (like Samsung) that are connected to the Internet themselves, people will undoubtedly be visiting, reading, watching, and looking at your site differently than ever before.

Just as a different site design paradigm has developed for mobile (and the same, though slowly, for tablets), designing for the “10 foot experience” is pivotal to the future of media consumption. Sure, there’s the web browser on people’s personal computers. But will people be browsing your site on their phone? On their iPad? On a TV? In their brain?! The answer is (almost) all the above— which, obviously, has a significant effect on how you think about design. It’s clear a one-size-fits-all approach is out of the question.

So what’s the new paradigm? If you don’t have the opportunity to physically work with the developers of the new platform, what do you have to keep in mind to catch up? In our experience developing Clicker.tv, the 10 foot experience of our website, separately from Clicker.com, we learned a lot. Here are our recommendations for the things to consider as you explore designing for the TV yourself, adapted from Google TV’s Designing for TV.

1. The Display: What’s different about what they’ll see on your site?

- Thanks to the viewer being some distance away from the screen (10 feet, maybe?), traditional web pages become hard to read and harder to navigate. It becomes much more tough to perform basic tasks such as clicking on a pull-down menu or selecting certain buttons. The solution? Put yourself in your users’ shoes! After accepting that you’re going to have to display less information overall, simply and all above-the-fold (no scrolling, either!), how can you make your website as functional as it is beautiful?

- And don’t forget that the display has to load fast, too. Users prefer sites that are quick—and a 1-second delay in page load time has been found to equal 11% fewer page views. Woah. Imagine what an effect that has on your TV, where users expect content even more instantly. So, fight your excitement for the opportunity to create flashy visuals for your TV and, instead, consider performance as the key to success. Keep in mind that it’s likely the interface will already render more slowly than it would have on the web in the first place. So, keep it simple.

- Moreover, a different platform comes with different rules. Make sure your crazy typeface is easy on the eyes from 10ish feet away. You may have to play within updated color guidelines, avoiding bright reds, oranges, and whites to prevent distortion. And, finally, think about simple tricks to help your users—will video auto-play? Will images have the full-screen option prominent, maybe even highlighted by default? What will make your users most happy?