Digital television user interfaces are composed of text, graphics and video. Usability issues that arise include information visualization, searching and navigation. This paper introduces two user interface prototypes for digital television. Both prototypes were tested with real users and the test results are discussed.

Television is a powerful media with a strong influence on the lives of the individuals and their behaviour. As new interactive technologies are being developed and marketed with the home as the main market, this creates an effect on domestic activities. This paper is a description of five qualitative research methods applied to the field of interactive television (iTV) application design and evaluation. Overall, the reported work is unique in the young field of iTV, due to the range and variety of the applied methods, some of which are quite novel. The aim of the conducted research was to find techniques to meet TV viewers' future needs and to provide examples of future product concepts. Several techniques were used, including user study based on the ''cultural probes'' method, interviews, focus groups, design sessions, usability testing, and storytelling. The methods have been applied to average users not concentrating on specific user groups such as the children or the elderly, but these same methods when applied to specific user groups can help finding out about accessibility problems in the quest to achieve universally accessible iTV applications. There are also valuable results from including a group of TV producers in the design sessions to find new concepts of iTV programs. The implications of this paper for the HCI community concern gathering the user data and transforming the results into new product concepts.

This paper presents results from a set of design sessions held in a broadcasting company. The aim of research was to find a user centered design method which includes the future users into the product development in the early stages of new product design. In this case, the products were interactive television programs and applications for digital television. The study also aims at creating a design method with the user study participants as equal research partners with the designers.The study started with a user study in study participants' home environment. The user study results, a set of user profiles, was taken to a broadcasting company. A series of five design sessions with participants from the broadcasting company followed. New concepts of interactive television programs were designed during the design sessions. The study resulted in new concepts of interactive television programs and services for digital television that were created by both TV viewers and designers.

Abstract. This paper presents results from a user study and a set of design sessions conducted in a broadcasting company. During the design sessions, the designers created new concepts of interactive television programs for given TV viewers. The creative work was based on user profiles collected in the preceding user study. The aim of research was to include the future users into the product development in the early stages of new product design. Both TV viewers and designers created innovations of future interactive applications and the results are discussed.