Enhancing the user experience of TV user interfaces: the continuous interaction principle

Abstract

In this article we describe the contextual constraints for developing a new form of interaction technique for the TV environment (problem statement) and present a brief state of the art on currently researched interaction technologies for enhancing the TV experience (touch, point-and click, gesture, speech). Then design and development of the continuous interaction principle is presented followed by results from a first user evaluation. In the experimental user evaluation study, the research focus was to evaluate the continuous interaction principle by comparing two types of continuous input: touch and haptic feedback. While there was no difference in terms of usability for continuous input (haptic feedback) vs. touch input, the continuous input with haptic feedback is rated higher in terms of user experience than the touch input. The evaluation results in general indicate that new ways to interact with content can reduce complexity of the user interface and enhance the experiences of the user when interacting with an interactive TV system.