What is Wrong with the Electronic Program Guide

By Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

The contemporary Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is designed to help consumers choose a television program to watch or to record, but quickly becomes overwhelming for hundreds of channels. At any given instance the EPG displays only a small fragment of the available broadcast content. Personalized TV researchers have proposed strategies for automating the selection of a program by analyzing user preferences and past behavior. Nevertheless, considering the EPG as the most important element of the ITV usability entails the implicit assumption that the TV channel and content need not change and thus be benefited by the convergence with personal computers and the Internet. This article, presents findings that facilitate better design for EPGs and provide research directions beyond the EPG.

The contemporary EPG and the file explorer user interfaces (e.g. TiVo, Sky+) are not appropriate for long television listings, since they contain less information per screen than a printed TV listing. Furthermore, both methods for navigating television content are based on a simple visual mapping of the underlying data structures, without any consideration for the established television channel selection behavior. Recent research has identified this issue (Bonnici 2003), but there is still no UI design and evaluation with consumers.

The TiVo menu also offers a user interface for stored programs, but future digital STBs will feature terabytes of storage and the navigation complexity problem will arise again. Therefore, there is a need for widely published usability evaluations of the TiVo (and the Sky+) EPG and local storage UI.

Researchers have long realized that the EPG is merely a data-set to use together with user preferences and watching behavior for recommendation engines (Ehrmantraut et al. 1996) or for automatically recording TV content on video servers (Nakamura et al. 2000). Smyth and Cotter (2000) argue that EPG design is an important factor that may influence the selection of TV programs to watch, given a large channel repertoire and local storage of programs.

Still, there is a need for a visual user interface to display program recommendations to users. The majority of the respective research has neglected the issues of presenting the recommendations or automatically assembling a TV program. In one rare exception to the rule, animated characters have been proposed as a way of increasing trust in program recommendations (Diederiks 2003), but in general, beyond presenting a list of choices, the method of presentation for the recommendation results is still an open issue.

On the other hand, Carey (1999) maintains that the enhancement of each type of television content and the introduction of new formats can actually drive ITV adoption by consumers. In particular, previous research in the mass communication discipline demonstrated that TV viewers usually settle down for a small set of channels.

In most cases, previous research about EPG and ITV had an Information Technology (IT) mentality and assumes that the viewers, each time they open the TV, need to select a channel or a program out of the available set of broadcasts. However, long established research in the mass communication discipline has identified that the TV viewers settle down with a small number of channels and that they adhere to a ritualistic process in watching the same programs everyday or every week (Lee and Lee 1995).

In addition, assuming the EPG as the most important element of the ITV design entails the implicit consequence that the TV channel and content need not change and thus be benefited by the convergence with the IT and the Internet. The EPG is one type of ITV UI that is independent of the TV content, although recent research has suggested a closer integration of the EPG with the TV content (Bonnici 2003).

In summary, contemporary EPG usability is very similar to the usability of productivity software, because it involves more information processing than enjoyment of TV content. EPG navigation and information processing can be modeled after the traditional HCI tasks and goals, but for most other types of ITV content there is a need for an affective usability evaluation instrument. The EPG paradigm has been convenient among researchers with a background in information retrieval and user modeling, but the respective research provides little contribution to ITV usability. Moreover, the design of ITV content is not the design of the EPG, unless it is assumed that the TV content itself will remain unaffected by the introduction of interactivity.

Further research about the EPG should build on previous findings from the mass communication discipline and it should focus on the affective aspect of user interaction (i.e. selecting a program to watch is not a goal in itself and it should be an enjoyable activity).

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