Information Systems in the Living Room: A Case Study of Personalized Interactive TV Design

ABSTRACT The birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993, particularly its graphical user interface, offered marketers opportunities that were previously unimaginable. The WWW allows for advanced marketing activities and, moreover, for interactive marketing, as the user is actively involved in responding to the vendor’s promotion campaign. Interactive TV, also referred to as iTV, combines the appeal and mass audience of traditional TV with the interactive features such as those currently available on the Web and offers new possibilities for the viewer, who can directly access relevant information and other services being just ‘one-click’ away. While personalisation is a practice used widely on the Internet by many sites that exploit the huge amount of customer information they collect, applying personalisation techniques over interactive television presents a number of obstacles. In this paper we focus our attention on the design and testing process of the User Interface (UI) for the Interactive & Personalized Advertisement TV viewer. The challenges of designing interactive TV applications are based on the differences of the medium from the traditional PC based Information Systems in terms of input and output devices, viewing environment, number of users and low level of expertise in PC usage.

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