Forces that Affect the Design of Interactive Television Applications

by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

The field of HCI has been benefited by a multidisciplinary approach to design problems (Ballay 1994). Successful user interfaces, apart from proven methodologies and multiple design iterations, demand a diverse array of design specialties. For the case of digital television, an exploratory literature review has revealed three important disci-plines of design: 1) Broadcasting and consumer electronics engineering, 2) ethno-graphic study of media consumption in home and 3) Interactive and multimedia con-tent creation. Researchers from the respective fields have addressed the design case of multimedia services in the home, but there is currently no aggregate effort towards the direction of a holistic design for digital television applications. Following a survey of diverse scientific perspectives on the field of digital television applications, the most useful findings from each discipline have been collected and analyzed.
Each of the next paragraphs presents an instance of the role of a discipline to the design of digital television applications and a respec-tive design force. This formal method of analysis, as suggested by Alexander (1964), provides a well-defined environment of relationships and dependencies.

Broadcasting and Consumer Electronics Engineering

The broadcasting model of computing encompasses a radical shift in the mentality of application development process and tools. Milenkovic (1997) highlights the differ-ences with the client-server mentality, describes the carousel concept and explains why the characteristics of the networking infrastructure are an important factor in the type of feasibly deployed applications. Engineers should also justify the use of digital local storage (Whittingham 2000), which currently makes inroads into a multitude of con-sumer electronics products. Persistent local storage takes viewer control one big step further —from simple channel selection with the remote— by offering the opportunity for non-linear local programming and content selection.
Design Force. The design should integrate seamlessly and reflect appropriately both the broadcasting computing model and local storage functionality.
Dependency. Both types of programming should be available, without sacrificing easy access to either type of content. Each type should complement the other, instead of competing against it.

Ethnographic Study of Media Consumption in the Home

The role of ethnographic research in the home, regarding the use of digital television applications, is instrumental. There has been an important technology-driven shift in the household’s media consumption patterns every decade or so —in the 80’s there was the PC (Vitalari et al. 1985) and in the 90’s there was the Internet (Kraut et al. 1996). It is likely, that the first decade of the new millennium will see the introduction of a new range of home entertainment appliances. This trend is already apparent and has been studied with ethnographic methods for the case of the digital set-top box. O’Brien et al. (1999) identified that the ‘concentration of functionality’ sometimes works against solitary use of information technology.
Design Force. Different designs are needed for family viewing groups in the living room and single users in their bedrooms.
Dependency. Design the system to handle group or solitary use and provide means of adapting to different situations if both are desirable.

Interactive and Multimedia Content Production

When contemplating the impact of technical change on the media industry, there is a common danger to avoid. It goes under the view that new technologies and media will completely substitute the old ones, rather than coexist —for example that television and radio would mean the end of newspapers, or the PC bring the paperless office. Henhry Jenkins (2001), the director of the program in ‘Comparative Media Studies’ at MIT, opposes to the popular view that interactive television will support only the needs of the channel surfers by making an analogy: ‘With the rise of printing, inten-sive reading was theoretically displaced by extensive reading: readers read more books and spent less time on each. But intensive reading never totally vanished.’
Design Force. Design should support both interactive and passive users.
Dependency. Interactivity can be feasibly deployed over digital television, although current television patterns of use are passive.

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