Interactive TV user experience in behavioral situations

Abstract

Television (TV) is one of the most familiar products in our lives. As TVs evolve into interactive products, the user experience (UX) surrounding TV is also changing. Interactive TV attributes provide new capabilities; however, it is not clear how this affects the TV viewer's experience. The perceived quality of interactive products has two sub-dimensions: ergonomic attributes and hedonic attributes. Users perceive the quality of interactive products differently according to behavioral situations, and have overall experiences through a combination of those sub-dimensions. We hypothesize that a match between an individual's behavior and a particular product's attributes (i.e., ergonomic, hedonic) determine the perceived value of interactive products. Subsequently, we conducted a study with eighty TV viewers, in which half were asked to perform goal-directed tasks with interactive TV and the other half were asked to perform experiential tasks. The results obtained show that interactive TV viewers find interactive TV more appealing when they perform goal-directed behaviors. Regardless of the purpose of use, hedonic attributes were higher than ergonomic attributes on the perceived value of interactive TV. This implies the fundamental purpose of the user-TV interaction is to experience pleasure and achieving the goal is also the pleasure-seeking process as part of the fun. This also implies that hedonic aspect is the important factor than the ergonomic aspect on the TV-viewing experience regardless of the situation. The results demonstrate the potential value of hedonic quality as a measurement factor of interactive TV user experience evaluation and provide implications that interactive TV UX should be designed to enhance the enjoyable experience.