2. The Navigation: What’s different about how they’ll interact with your site?

- Forget everything you knew about the mouse—you’re going to have to entirely reinvent your site’s navigation. Your font and button sizes have to increase exponentially so users can see them from their La-Z-Boy. Restricted mostly to up/down and left/right movements, your users are going to want large selection surfaces that expand or, at least, ones that are clearly highlighted when someone navigates to them. It might also be valuable to add padding/white space between elements so users don’t get confused.

- Another challenge is getting rid of the vertical scrolling bar. It’s fundamental to desktop browsing, but basically useless on the 10-ft UI. Horizontal layouts and visual transitions between different content pages will help your user navigate your new design, keeping everything “above the fold” and within an easy up/down left/right reach. While you’re at it, erase any navigational arrows, clickable page numbers, and more. Give a super easy, clear way to get back to your Home page from every page. Think through what’ll help your users most.

- No matter how intuitive your page’s new navigation is, when people arrive there, you’re going to have to explain it (something users on desktop browser rarely need). Because there’s no time for poking around or taking a “tour,” an immediate pop-up/notification upon entry can effectively explain your navigation and what your site’s all about.

- Some great examples to check out include the TV interfaces of CHOW, Flixster, Blip.tv, Vevo, and The New York Times!

Clicker.tv is just the first step for us. As the TV increasingly becomes our monitor, how will users interact? How will their behavior change, adapt, and grow? We don’t know, but we’re looking forward to doing what we can to keep on top of it and keep delivering the absolute best user experience we can.

This is a guest post from Clicker. Clicker is the complete programming guide for the new era of Internet TV. Clicker catalogs 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 and 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?

Ustream.tv Recognized as Most Innovative: In the category of the “web,” Ustream.tv was ranked one of the top 10 most innovative companies by FastCompany. Since launching it’s pay-per-view and social stream feature, the site has really grown “in January, the site attracted 70 million unique viewers, up 500% from the year before.”

One Quarter of New TVs Sold in January are Connected to the Internet: Making it that much harder to tell the difference between the Internet and TV, and making the online video space much more interesting, iSuppli released information that 25% of all TVs sold in January were connected to the Internet. Wonder where this will lead…

Mr. DNS is Great: I took DNS (Domain Name System) training today given by VeriSign’s very own Matt Larson. It was a terrific class. It’s fascinating to understand the history and all that goes into resolving a domain name or an email address. For those of you that would like to really know how domain names work, his podcasts can be found at www.ask-mrdns.com

Introducing the VeriSign Trust Seal: This announcement isn’t about .tv or online video specifically; but our sibling division at VeriSign had a big announcement this week that helps the Internet as a whole; so I wanted to pass it along. Fellow VeriSign blogger Tim Callahan’s blog has more details, but the new product adds daily malware scans and will make available the VeriSign Trust Seal to sites that don’t require SSL encryption.

Now, I owned my Xbox long before the Netflix app was available. My friends bought it for me one Christmas several years ago because they were moving out of state so we could keep in touch. At the time I was skeptical (why would I want to get dominated online playing against tweens who were vastly superior at video games?) but in time I’ve grown to love the little white joy box in my living room. Skepticism aside, I would have run out and bought one myself immediately after Netflix launched their application to stream movies to your television.

The streaming video service is free to Netflix subscribers and uses all your current account (movie queue) information. This means that you don’t have to do anything special besides the one-time configuration when you download the app to your Xbox and your queue is immediately available. Now, not all Netflix videos are available – the last number I saw was around 12,000 movies & television shows – but I can tell you firsthand that Netflix is busily adding new content all the time. Random movies from my queue pop up on the Xbox app from time to time, which is truthfully akin to having random extra birthdays (I get excited easily, what can I say?).

In addition to constantly adding new content, they just released an update on the Xbox that adds cool new functionality like having the ability to watch videos in a ‘party’ – which means that I can watch terrible movies and offer MST3K-like commentary with friends in other states. Thank you Netflix, for removing the distance barrier from sharing terrible B-movie experiences with friends! I hear other things are either in the works or here now, like the ability in the app to choose from streaming movies not currently in your queue.

So, to wrap up this absurdly long blog post:

1. I’m a gamer.
2. Netflix + Xbox 360 = “teh awesomes” [its misspelled on purpose]
3. Streaming video, even in its infancy, it’s pretty pervasive.  And it’s only going to get better!

Fun fact: in Joystiq’s August 2009 interview with Steve Swasey (VP of Marketing for Netflix), Steve stated that “…more than one million Xbox gold members have watched more than a billion and a half minutes of movies and TV episodes via the Xbox 360.”