User evaluation outside the lab: the trial of Físchlár-News

A user study of Fischlar-News system was conducted in Spring 2004 with 16 users, each user using the system for a 1-month period. Fischlar-News is an experimental online news archive that incorporates various automatic content-based video indexing techniques and a news story recommender algorithm to process and index the daily 9 o’clock broadcast news from TV and allows its users to browse, search, be recommended, and play news stories on a conventional web browser. Pre and post-trial questionnaires, interaction logging and incident diary methods collected both qualitative and quantitative usage data during the trial period. While the details of the findings from this evaluation is reported elsewhere, in this paper we report the details of the methodology taken and our experience of conducting this evaluation.