Affective Usability Evaluation for Animated Characters in Interactive Television Applications

By Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Animated characters research for desktop computing has been very popular, but the respective commercial implementations (e.g. the Microsoft Office Clip) are reported to be annoying to the end users. The explanation might be that the attention grabbing and interrupting nature of animated characters is inappropriate for the majority of the productivity computing activities. On the other hand, the majority of television content has traditionally been about stories and character development. Therefore, animated characters might be viable in an leisure setting for entertainment activities, like interactive television. Next, we summarize previous research about animated characters for ITV and present a few preliminary results from a recent affective usability evaluation study.

Animated characters research begun from the human-computer interaction (HCI) discipline as an alternative to the desktop metaphor and as a visual user interface for agent-based systems. Since then, animated characters research has probed activity in many different disciplines, while it maintains a strong following in the HCI and in the intelligent user interface (IUI) domain. Next, we focus on previous research about animated characters for ITV.

In the beginning, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute proposed alternative user interface metaphors for interactive television applications. In a usability evaluation, they found that the use of human characters as virtual guides raised the least amount of negative opinions, while at the same time it raised the majority of suggestions for improvements. The former can be explained because the television viewers are familiar with the idea of having human presenters for television shows. Regarding the latter, subjects’ comments can be summarized in asking for more natural and conversational interaction.

Immediately after Fraunhofer, it was Philips Research (Kohar et al. 1997; Meuleman et al. 1998; Diederiks 2003) that has continued to date the investigation about animated characters for ITV applications. The respective usability tests that were performed using Philips-designed animated characters have reported positive user evaluations for a number of issues, like trust, expectations, preference. Nevertheless, animated characters were solely used for presenting TV program recommendations from the personalization engine. From this perspective, animated characters have been only tested as a user interface for a personalized EPG application. In our research, we investigated the use of animated characters as an integral part of a real world television program type; music television.

In particular, we employed the MS Agent system in an ITV prototype that was evaluated by consumers. Those who have been exposed before to the Office Assistant (through the Microsoft Office suite of applications) recognized the similarity (due to the balloon-style dialog, which is standard for the characters designed by Microsoft) despite the use of a different character (the genie) and some of them reacted negatively to the concept of the animated character. Therefore, it can be argued that the animated character from the desktop application has a carry-over effect to the ITV applications. Especially for users who are already negatively predisposed to it, they will continue to be so, at the expense of their satisfaction with the whole TV program. For those users, we suggest that the animated character should be an option and an alternative user interface should be available to select. Nevertheless, most of the users considered the character funny and less obtrusive compared with human presenters, who interrupt the video clip to present related information. Furthermore, users asked for more characters and the option to select their favorite presenter. Users also asked for more control of the character, like changing its placement on the screen. Finally, most of the users disliked the solid balloon dialog that stands over the head of the character. According to their suggestions the best choice for the balloon dialog would be a transparent one across the bottom of the screen.

We also found that there was a difference in the perceived entertainment value between the animated character and the transparent box for the related information presentation style. The perceived entertainment for a music video television channel is significantly higher when using an animated character for presenting information related to the running program, compared with the traditional transparent information box. Finally, consumers were neutral toward the traditional information box, since it is a widely used and familiar presentation style for information related to music video clips. Nevertheless, more research is needed to assess additional affective usability dimensions, like emotions, behavior and attitudes toward animated characters for interactive television.

The paper Affective Usability Evaluation for an Interactive Music Television Application from ACM Computers in Entertainment explains the above study in detail.

An ITV programming library that supports animated characters has been developed in order to facilitate and continue the experiments.

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