Usability Testing of Interactive Multimedia Services

Interactive multimedia services, such as video-on-demand offered to the public at home need to be tested carefully for usability. The environment as well as users is heterogeneous and they use different input and output devices than with a personal computer. User Interface designers need to learn more about the users, their environment and the hindrances they encounter. Two service trials were conducted where thirty families had access to video-on-demand, news-on-demand and worldwide web services for three months. The users had access to the services via a set-top-box connected to a television or via a personal computer. The paper describes how three methods: logging, thinking-aloud and questionnaires were applied as well as their results. Finally, the experiences from using the methods are discussed