The Current State of Usability Design for Interactive Television

By Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Despite the increased deployment of digital television technology and the widespread use of the internet, interactive television has yet to replace analog television or overcome the personal computer as the preferred device for interactive infotainment in the home. Nevertheless, both the media and the consumer electronics industries are keen on trying to develop a viable product. Next, we review briefly the current situation of interactive television from the perspective of usability design.

Carey (1997) notes that interactive television is a technical development that has been promised for a long time ago, but never achieved a successful commercial materialization. Reasons for failure are attributed to immature technology, high costs and mainly to information technology driven features coupled with user interface design inspired by the personal computer practice.

It has also been widely evident, in the course of a literature review, that the approach followed by the majority of scientific publications is mainly PC-centric and most times implicitly focused on the work environment. Differences between the two environments and strategies for resolution of the issues have been noted by academics and practitioners (Brouwer-Janse et al. 1992; Mountford et al. 1992; Herigstad and Wichansky 1998) and are being summarized by Nielsen (1997).

Nevertheless, the application of usability design principles to the case of interactive television has been driven more by entrepreneurial spirit —such as TiVo's— or media giant interactive TV trials —such as Time Warner's Future Service Network and more recently AOLTV— than by methodological, published and widely available academic research. A rare exception to this rule is the publication of a set-top box trial by O’Brien et al (1999).

Unfortunately, traditional usability engineering techniques are focused on and have been developed to measure work-related goals like successful task completion, efficiency and error rate, parameters that are usually correlated positively with user satisfaction. Most notable among the recent findings about the HMS class of devices is the realization that users’ subjective satisfaction is at odds with performance metrics.

In usability test of three video skipping interfaces (two commercial and one novel), users preferred the interface that required more time, clicks and had the highest error rate. According to Drucker et al. (2002) ‘While the performance based on time to task completion and number of clicks was the worst in the novel interface, the user satisfaction was significantly better with this interface.’ Users reasoned their choice on the basis of how fun and relaxing an interface was.

In our opinion, traditional human-computer interaction settings involve a task-oriented approach where the human interacts with an application to accomplish a particular goal. The emergence of media-rich computer-mediated leisure applications, like video-on-demand and interactive television, require a fresh view of the current paradigms and a careful examination of how this change of perspective affects their relevance.

In this direction, a new paradigm for access to interactive television programming is described in Chorianopoulos and Spinelllis (2002).

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