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Five qualitative research methods to make iTV applications universally accessible

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Abstract

Television is a powerful media with a strong influence on the lives of the individuals and their behaviour. As new interactive technologies are being developed and marketed with the home as the main market, this creates an effect on domestic activities. This paper is a description of five qualitative research methods applied to the field of interactive television (iTV) application design and evaluation. Overall, the reported work is unique in the young field of iTV, due to the range and variety of the applied methods, some of which are quite novel. The aim of the conducted research was to find techniques to meet TV viewers’ future needs and to provide examples of future product concepts. Several techniques were used, including user study based on the “cultural probes” method, interviews, focus groups, design sessions, usability testing, and storytelling. The methods have been applied to average users not concentrating on specific user groups such as the children or the elderly, but these same methods when applied to specific user groups can help finding out about accessibility problems in the quest to achieve universally accessible iTV applications. There are also valuable results from including a group of TV producers in the design sessions to find new concepts of iTV programs. The implications of this paper for the HCI community concern gathering the user data and transforming the results into new product concepts.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank all the study participants for providing their time and help with the research, as well as research partners at the public service broadcasting company YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company) and colleagues at the Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuable comments and suggestions, and Master of Arts student Riikka Kevo for the two “Artist’s view of the future” drawings. This research has received financial support from Helsinki Graduate School in Computer Science and Engineering (HeCSE), YLE 75 Years Fund, and Nokia Foundation.

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  1. Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 5400, 02015 HUT, Helsinki, Finland

    Leena Eronen

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Eronen, L. Five qualitative research methods to make iTV applications universally accessible. Univ Access Inf Soc 5, 219–238 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-006-0031-2

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