Interactive TV service design

In this paper, we present our research project in progress entitled “RNRT iTV Project: Anticipation of future usage of interactive television services and usability evaluation of anticipated services”. Our objective is to defend common users of future interactive television. As many of today’s interactive products, interactive television causes usability problems for non-technophile users. The interactive television may be particularly interesting to usability specialists of everyday products, first because the application of interactivity takes place on a traditional medium which has undergone few changes since 1950’s. And also because the audience covers extremely large portion of the population. Almost everyone has at least one domestic TV set and watches it in their everyday life. For these reasons, the consideration of common users takes the most important part of our project. An multidisciplinary design process is undertaken for user-centered design of future interactive TV services in order to generate useful services of the future iTV and to design them usable by majority users. The purpose of this paper is to describe our design process. The process is organized to answer both “what to offer” as interactive services and “how to operate” them. Regarding to the usability aspect of the future system of iTV, we present in particular two video observation tests that took place at the early phase of the project.