Here’s a quick summary of some more presentations from the EuroITV conference:
* The use of TV as a reminder system for seniors’ medication (Brazil). Not that crazy of an idea.
* A panel on the impact of Internet on the traditional TV remote. The panel moved a bit strangely. Each presenter advocated an idea, one after another on the future of TV (the TV guide is dying, the future is in placeshifting, quality content is king, etc.).
* User expectations in terms of self-identification on interactive TV (for a personalized experience). A study was presented on the acceptability of different interaction modes on televisions in Austria. Strangely, fingerprint identification proved to be the users’ favorite …?
* A comparative study between a traditional remote control and a remote touchpad: the two remotes are more or less equal in terms of error rate, but the touchpad requires a lot more user movement. The author concludes by stating his opinion that these remotes are destined to become popular in 5 years time, when touch interfaces become the majority.
* Recommendations: Because there’s so much content, specialists are calling for the television timetable to be replaced by intelligent recommender systems. A researcher presented an interesting overview of problems with recommender systems. One challenge is the notion of time; it is difficult to make good recommendations at first, as there would be no initial user data (implicit profiling). He continued to present a method to optimize this element, a bit complex .. On the same topic, another author has summarized his study on the use of recommendation software for Youtube videos as a Facebook application. Their system uses a method combining both subjective measures and explicit judgements (user ratings of movies) and objective measurement (automated analysis of listening habits - eg playing time of a video, kind of the most popular videos, etc..). The system indicates that explicit and implicit data seem to converge, and that this combined approach is promising. However, the majority of participants indicated they would not continue with the experiment afterward, as they judged it too demanding…
I presented a novel comparative test method as part of a workshop at the EuroITV 2010 conference in Tampere, Finland. We discussed different methods of user research and in which contexts to use them. I’ve posted a picture which might give you an idea of how complex and specific the brainstorming can get after a full day workshop with world-class iTV professionals. ;)
Marcos Gonzalez-Flower of Siemens IT Solutions and Services, a German company facing the many challenges of the modern cable company, gave the opening presentation on Thursday morning. He spoke of the role of broadcasters who must evolve to eventually position themselves as mere content aggregators, as users are increasingly interested in building their own TV offerings through increasing use of personalization and personal recorders which allow us to watch our favorite shows whenever we want. This trend is resulting in the gradual abandonment of traditional linear TV viewing.
He showed that this transformation will affect the whole world of advertising, which must redouble its efforts to offer new and innovative advertising models. In this regard, he discussed a new concept from SKY in England called
Adsmart. This model involves sending personalized advertising (based on monitoring user behaviour) directly to the user’s terminal and then triggering these advertisements at the appropriate time (between program segments or between two programs, whether saved by the user or live). He also mentioned that ads could appear during the loading of content or applications.
After the opening talk, I attended several other presentations, including one on the use of interactive applications in Belgium. The study demonstrated that users are slow to adopt interactive applications for their TV. The author suggested that personalization of content appears to be a promising way to increase the use of applications such as video on demand.
Joëlle Stemp from Yu Centrik, was a presenter at WebEducation, a monthly Quebec government event directed at web analysts, on February 18th. Title of the presentation: “Designing User Experience for the 3 screens” (Web, iTV, Mobile).
Pierre-Alexandre Lapointe, one of Yu Centrik’s UX Directors, recently taught two sessions: one at the University of Montreal, École Polytechnique, on “Designing User Experience for Interactive Television,” and the other at Montreal Business School on “Creating Personas”.
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Pierre-Alexandre Lapointe and I recently presented some Yu Centrik research on design methodology and alphanumeric input for interactive TV at Euro ITV 2009 in Leuven, Belgium.
The community is in very strong agreement that TV’s place in the future lies somewhere between a traditional source of broadcast content and a fully interactive computer. At Euro ITV 2009, professionals from around the world were drawing lines in the sand on the dimensions of social interaction, user generated content, broadcast vs. downloadable content, input devices, media convergence and systemic integration. While synthesizing the information presented, I wanted to add two high-level design perspectives which should be considered by those on the front lines creating an iTV system or service for real users.
The “living room” context of television might shift user values.
Many of the papers presented discussed the main distinguishing factor of television is its appeal for a “lean back” experience; users tend to be in a more relaxed state when watching tv. From a design perspective, this issue might actually reflect a shift in values. When debating issues for an iTV system, unlike the web, consider that a more engaging, expressive or fun interaction model might provide a better experience than one that is more classically ‘usable’ (efficient, clear, direct).
Optimizing business organization for cohesive design.
Integrated solutions move beyond the traditional business model of the television industry. No longer can a service provider order a set-top-box from a hardware provider, configure a third-party remote and compete. This type of disjoint business model prevents one team from being responsible for a cohesive design vision and serves as a major obstacle to user experience. The suggestion is not necessarily to perform all these tasks in-house, but instead for the individual units to collaborate more openly on a specific service (the service provider and hardware providers should be open to customizing and adapting their products for a unified vision).
Access specific details from the conference: EuroITV Proceedings
So, where do I start? If you’ve been following my Twitter @jayvidyarthi, you know that last week I experienced an overload of knowledge transfer at the annual CHI conference in Boston. I wanted to write a blog updating all of you on some of the fantastic methodologies, processes and technologies on the fringe of our field. First, let me tell you a little about my read on the main theme of the conference.
Tying directly into the Closing Plenary delivered by Kees Overbeeke from Eindhoven, I observed the underlying theme of HCI and design today as focusing on the humanization of technology. Computer systems no longer have to be cold and digital. Instead, they can behave more organically, installing themselves into our lives in a natural way. Kees described how our relationships with technology can even go beyond such seamless integration. He presented a lamp which gradually loses power. As one pets the lamp, as if it were a cat or dog, it comes back to life. This was an example of technology which can appeal to our emotions and connect with our users in a more profound way (while also being environmentally friendly!). The tradeoffs between a practical and useful lamp and a “pet” lamp are still to be explored, but Kees’ point of view undoubtedly inspires questions about the future directions of human-computer interaction.
Although not every researcher is ‘dreaming of the impossible’ like Kees, a broad survey of projects from various angles at CHI 2009 show that seamless integration is the underlying theme of our technological future. I decided to summarize a few interesting projects for you to check out, but by no means is this a comprehensive summary. Check out the official CHI program summary to get many more descriptions and references on the fringe of HCI.
Some Highlights
- Eric Gilbert’s work on building a predictive model for social networks allowing a system such as Facebook to automatically distinguish your close friends from your distant acquaintances based on your behaviour with the system. A short summary on Eric’s blog
- John Zimmerman is building a strong design philosophy centered around creating products which promote self-identity. An application of product attachment theory to design specifically for role transition and self enhancement. Really fantastic stuff for the creative theorist. John’s Research Description
- Sunny Consolvo is working on the Ubifit Garden, a wallpaper for your mobile phone which measures how much time you spend sedentary, walking, running, biking, etc., and grows flowers and plants to indicate your physical exertion. The system serves as a subtle ambient measure of your own exercise which creates a motivating factor within your cellphone. A Poster Describing the Ubitfit Garden
- Tovi Grossman et. al. at Autodesk are designing and testing a new approach to measure the learnability of an interface: the Question-Suggestion model. By having a coach directly interact with users, the method extracts specific problems and provides a more precise measure of interface learnability. Extremely valuable for any kind of longitudinal usability testing of complex interfaces. Description of the Paper @ ACM
- David Geerts from Leuven presented well-justified heuristics for the implementation of social functionality in interactive TV systems. Hopefully I’ll hear more from David when I head to Euro ITV 2009 in Belgium to present Yu Centrik’s interactive TV research findings. David’s Presentation Slides (jump to slide 33)
- Sarah Diefenbach and Mark Hassenzahl presented a thought-provoking piece on the interaction of Beauty and Usability on consumer product choice. The paper served as a launching point for an intense panel discussion including a tirade on the definition of beauty from Bill Buxton. Very engaging stuff. Sarah and Mark’s Thought-Provoking Paper
- Leanne Hirshfield from Robert Jacob’s lab at Tufts University presented some early work on using fNIR brain imaging to get a read on human syntactic and semantic workload. The eventual fruits of this work could lead to interfaces which can adapt to the users’ cognitive load by reading bloodflow in the brain. If this project starts to fly, interfaces could get very interesting. A Description of the Adaptive Interfaces using fNIR Project
- Alexander Hoffman is working on TypeRight, a keyboard which uses language dictionaries to adjust the resistance of keys on the keyboard based on the probability of each letter being pressed. I tried using the keyboard and barring some minor technical issues, it seems to have potential to help us avoid type-os and increase our overall typing speed. The TypeRight Project
- David Frolich presented a case study of StoryBank, a mobile-phone and touch-screen based system allowing children in rural India to develop narrated slideshow videos. Being a kind of “local, embodied youtube”, the interfaces involved no language, enabling use by illiterate children in the village. The findings were quite surprising, and the videos made were very powerful. David was intent on stressing how our technology can help the developing world. The StoryBankHomepage
Again, if you enjoy this type of work, check out the CHI program summary for more quick descriptions! If you want details and have access to ACM’s digital library, check out the full proceedings.
