A Usability Evaluation of a Personal Video Recorder : Navigation and channel list management from a user perspective

This thesis aimed to evaluate the user interaction with a Personal Video Recorder software in development by Zenterio. The evaluation focus was on learnability, satisfaction, identification of usability issues and proposing redesign to solve them. A user test with eleven participants was carried out, measuring task success, completion time, lostness, post-task satisfaction and post-session satisfaction across three trials. The seven user tasks concerned mainly channel lists and recording functionality; the former is examined closer in this paper. The results showed that the channel lists were somewhat difficult to manage initially but fairly quickly learned. The satisfaction was lower in the beginning and high after three trials. The results across all tasks followed similar learnability patterns and the overall satisfaction with the interface interaction pointed at the need of improvements. Nine usability issues were discovered concerning channel lists and navigation; they were rated by severity and redesign proposals were given. The issue with the strongest impact on the success of the interaction was the difficulty to find out how to open the submenus