In-situ evaluation of users’ first impressions on a unified electronic program guide concept

In-situ studies and evaluations are increasingly appreciated and requested by companies and developers. Direct feedback from the users is seen as an important source to further improve a system, to make it usable, acceptable and useful for the users in a final stage. In this article, we report the results from a conducted in-situ field study for a newly developed EPG (Electronic Program Guide) system. One of the main challenges of our research was to find the right methodological set-up in order to gather direct and fast user feedback by bringing developers and users together in a real life setting. Thereby, it was important that the users could easily express their first impressions of the system in an engaging way. Based on our previous work, a creative and playful approach was selected and combined with a variation of the walkthrough method. In this article, we provide a description of the methods used, their combinations, and the lessons learned throughout the one-week field study involving different stakeholders.

► The Unified EPG enables user handling the ever-increasing amount of content.
► We supported information exchange between developers and end users.
► Direct and fast user feedback for system improvements was ensured.
► The playful method approach supported the involvement of different user groups.
► A user-centered design increased the acceptance of the novel interaction concept.