Join the Joyride!1: An Identification of Three Important Factors for Evaluation of On-line Entertainment.

Abstract: This paper identify three different categories of entertainment in the Eurovision Song Contest web site. (1)Contest related content (2) Value-adding content (3). Design- and technology related entertainment. These types arose in an empirical study, a usability evaluation, conducted on twenty test persons. Methods used were usage of general forms, think-aloud protocol with task analysis in combination with a more 'free surf ' approach. The level of intervention of the evaluators were also changed between tests. Finally, interviews, both about the web page and the experiment in itself were conducted. The tests were done with both single users as well as pair of users. The main purpose of the tests were to find guidelines in how to evaluate entertainment web sites. The findings show that there are actually guidance to give from out of the three categories of entertainment. Intervention could actually be a good thing sometimes, working together is both good and bad, depending on which of the above mentioned category we are striving to say something about and finally traditional task analysis is not all bad for testing entertainment after all