Weekly TiVo User Testing
Sara Sprenkle, 2008/09/11 12:56
Read the article Weekly User Testing: TiVo Did It, You Can, Too and write a comment containing the following information:
- On a scale of 0 to 9, your interest in this paper
- Summarize the three main ideas of the paper, briefly
- How does this paper relate to our class?
- At least one question for class discussion
- Synthesis. Synthesize what you've read in the three articles. What are the big take-away messages? Do you have any overall questions based on all three articles?
Discussion
My interest in this paper is a 7. I have never used TiVo so I can not personally attest to its usability.
The three main ideas in this paper are that the users are the determining factor of the usability of a product, more user testing, preferably weekly, helps to make sure that the design is still user based and usable, and to fix the problems that users find with their own feedback. This is another example of the use of iterative design, an important element of human and computer interaction, in real life.
I would like to discuss whether this design would also work with the actual DVR service?
Synthesis: The biggest messages are to have cheap models for testing, make sure that the users are testing and retesting the models, and that the users’ feedback is implemented in each new development.
I do not have any additional questions.
I liked this paper better than the other two, so I give it an 8. I thought it was an interesting concept to synchronize the usability of the tiVo interface with the usability of their website.
The three main idea of this paper are 1) Weekly user testing is the best way to account for usability in designing an interface 2) TiVo used this method and found it successful 3)the benefits and outcomes of this study make it a good model for any design.
This paper relates to our class through the iterative design approach, but puts it in a real-life context in the TiVo case study.
Even though TiVo took the faster, cheaper approach, I wonder how much something like this would cost because it was iterated so many times?
By reading these three articles I took away that faster and cheaper user testing can be better (Faster and Cheaper), more users is not always better, and even big companies like TiVo choose the smaller-scale studies.
Obviously this author is trying to prove a consistent point, but I wonder what a larger-scale (more than 5 users) study would look like? What are its benefits? And really how much more expensive would it be?