Modelling VCR-like video content navigation

Although various alternative control sets have been proposed for various purposes, VCR-like control sets remain the most commonly used for everyday video content navigation by many professional and home users, due to their predominance within popular commercial media players, such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime and RealPlayer. Consequently, this paper proposes a model of user interaction with VCR-like control sets, with the aims of better understanding the process and informing the development of future video content navigation control sets. The model is derived from the results of empirical experimentation. A digital video navigation system with a VCR-like control set was developed and subsequently used by a large sample of users (n=200), who were required to complete a number of goal-directed navigational tasks. Each user's navigational activity was tracked and recorded automatically by the system. Subsequent analysis revealed several patterns of interaction employed by users that were then used to construct the model.