Minimizing impact of loading time and presentation to user experience in modern Over the Top television

Modern applications running on digital TV sets and set-top box devices are tasked to show variety of content. With the emerge of the Over the Top (OTT) television, applications have become complex, with increased demand for processing power and memory. With the addition of constrained bandwidth, loading times regarding the UI hierarchy traversal increased, therefore affecting user experience. In this paper, we propose a solution which minimizes impact of loading time and loading presentation to user experience, with specific regard to (1) functionality of OTT television applications; (2) typical user behavior and (3) modern requirements of OTT TV, including animated, 3D-enabled graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The proposed solution considers the introduction of several loading intervals and corresponding loading animations, which would provide for a smooth transitions and seamless user experience, avoiding the traditional loading indicators, such as spinning circles. During the evaluation it was shown that the proposed approach contributed significantly to the user perception of time which appeared to be shorted when compared to the traditional spinning circle indicator.