Design guidelines for adaptable videos and video players on the web

Abstract

Videos are embedded everywhere on the Web these days. They are becoming increasingly important to many people regardless of age, culture or individual capabilities. Unfortunately, not everyone benefits equally from online videos. There is often a big difference regarding the accessibility, usability and the resulting user experience. To close these gaps, occurring everywhere on the internet, dynamic user interfaces adapting to diverse user needs have received more attention recently. Therefore, users can meanwhile adapt a couple of sites according to their personal preferences by either switching between presentation modes or by adjusting some site settings. Taking up this idea, in this paper we examine the adaptability of online video players by focussing on two user groups: elderly people and deaf people. Based on our empirical research, we discuss issues reported by these groups and present abstract and concrete recommendations on how to realize personalized and adaptive video user interfaces for them.