User-Centered Interaction Design Patterns for Interactive Digital Television Applications

When a new technology - such as interactive digital television - is introduced to a wider audience, ease of use is often critical to success. By focusing on these usability issues with the aim of supporting user acceptance for interactive TV, Tibor Kunert provides clear guidelines for designing the user interfaces on interactive TV applications.

This guidance is presented in the form of design patterns, and a new approach is proposed that helps designers and developers to explore design alternatives and to evaluate the trade-offs that need to be made in order to maximise usability.

The 42 design patterns containing 185 guidelines provide comprehensive and empirically-validated guidance for designing interactive TV user interfaces. A pattern language is developed which can be used for designing specific applications, for enduring usability, and for defining corporate style guidelines and developing application templates that help streamline the process of production.

Autorentext

Tibor Kunert, PhD, has worked in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for the last 10 years. At the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, he focussed his research work on HCI for interactive media like interactive television. He managed several research and development projects with public and private television broadcasters.

He taught and supervised numerous master students on HCI and usability engineering methods and practices, for example for television, web applications and in-car information systems. Dr. Kunert is the author of 18 scientific papers and an invited conference speaker

He earned a PhD from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany. Presently he is working as HCI expert at Siemens AG in several international projects.

Klappentext

When a new technology such as interactive digital television is introduced to a wider audience, ease of use is often critical to success. By focusing on these usability issues with the aim of supporting user acceptance for interactive TV, Tibor Kunert provides clear guidelines for designing the user interfaces on interactive TV applications.

This guidance is presented in the form of design patterns, and a new approach is proposed that helps designers and developers to explore design alternatives and to evaluate the trade-offs that need to be made in order to maximise usability.

The 42 design patterns containing 185 guidelines provide comprehensive and empirically-validated guidance for designing interactive TV user interfaces. A pattern language is developed which can be used for designing specific applications, for enduring usability, and for defining corporate style guidelines and developing application templates that help streamline the process of production.

Zusammenfassung

Technology is meant to make life easier and to raise its quality. Our interaction with technology should be designed according to human needs instead of us being required to adapt to technology. Even so, technology may change quickly and people and their habits change slowly. With the aim of supporting user acceptance of iTV, the focus of this book is on the usability of iTV applications. A method for developing interaction design patterns especially for new technologies is presented for the first time.

The main characteristics covered in this new approach are: systematic identification of recurrent design problems; usability as a quality criterion for design solutions; integration of designers into the pattern development process including identification of designers' needs, and iterative evaluation and optimisation of patterns to encourage designers to accept and use them; usability testing to identify proven design solutions and their trade-offs; presentation of specific design guidelines.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- Motivation.- Problem and Aims.- Approach.- Structure of the book.- 2. Interactive TV Applications and Their Context of Use.- Interactive TV applications.- Context of use.- 3. Types of Design Guidance for iTV Applications.- Summary of existing design guidance for iTV applications.- Forms of design guidance.- 4. User Tasks and Requirements for iTV Applications.- Theory.- Applied Method.- Results.- Conclusions.- 5. Design Pattern Collection for iTV.- Framework for interaction design patterns.- Overview of the pattern language.- Interaction design patterns.- Conclusions.- 6. Method of Pattern Development.- Requirements analysis for iTV design guidance.- Hierarchy of iTV interaction design problems.- Design of iTV prototypes.- Usability test series.- Forming the pattern language.- Evaluation of the developed patterns.- 7. Conclusion.- Summary.- Discussion.- Main contributions.- Future research.- Appendix A.Characteristics of usability test participants.- Appendix B.Quantitative usability test result.