comcast tv guide

APA Style Sheet Running head: Comcast / iGuide Electronic Programming Guide 1 Factors Influencing the Design of the Comcast / iGuide Electronic Programming Guide Andrew Condon Bentley College APA Style Sheet Abstract The television viewing experience has gone through a radical transformation within the last decade. Increasing computer power has enabled cable providers to deliver more interactivity and information to 2 consumers through Electronic Programming Guides. Yet as these interfaces become more complex, users familiar with the sophistication of rich clients and web applications demand more. Here, the Comcast iGuide EPG is explored, specifically the main menu, navigation, and On Screen Guide. Ultimately, it is clear that design decisions for the iGuide are made almost exclusively from the perspective branding and product capabilities rather than usability. The inherently anti-competitive nature of regional cable monopolies means users are essentially dictated to; there is little ability for users to opt for products of better design. Factors Influencing the Design of the Comcast / iGuide Electronic Programming Guide During the last ten years, the evolution of the television viewing experience has been rapid, especially when compared to the previous sixty. Likely the most obvious and useful development has been the nearly complete adoption of Cable, and the advent of Electronic Programming Guides (EPG) that are now a staple of Cable and Satellite provider offerings around the world. EPGs in their most basic form simply inform viewers about the programming choices available to them currently and in the future, through limited interaction. In doing so, the software that is the EPG has essentially become the OS for the ubiquitous set-top-box (STB), and for an ever more voracious consumer base it is becoming increasingly important and integral to the television viewing experience. Viewers are becoming users, and the features and interactions they have long been familiar with from using the PC or the internet will be merged into their expectations for what the “cable box” can deliver to them. Understanding the viewer as a user is the real challenge for designing EPG interaction and feature sets for the foreseeable future. In this space, the Comcast EPG will be explored; however, to understand and judge the state of the user interface (UI) today or predict and recommend changes for the future, it is necessary to understand how this piece of software came to be, as it is. In an era of increasing APA Style Sheet expectations caused primarily by a growing familiarity with an ever more dynamic web, this provider supplied software faces incredible competition from nearly every direction. It is therefore critical to understand the historical underpinnings that have influenced the subsequent design of the software. As in nature, software does not evolve in a vacuum, but is largely shaped by external factors in the environment it exists in. For the Comcast, EPG, it will be important to review this history to gain a better understanding of why certain design choices were made the way they were. Following the historical perspective, an exploration of the EPG will occur with the intent of making linkages from design choices and features to the different externalities that drove them. Given the regulatory framework and region monopoly status of Cable providers, the influence of history and the external environment on design will be immense. Finally, a review of the EPG based on actual use and an evaluation of certain tradeoffs and constraints will be done, followed by some suggestions to improve any apparent deficiencies. 3 The History of Cable Television Media has been trending towards convergence during the first decade of the 21st century (Fowler, 2006); the “old media” lines drawn initially so clearly between print, broadcast television and radio, and telephony have blurred beyond recognition in accommodation of the tide of “new media” enterprises. With a merging of consumer electronics and media comes a merging of consumer expectations and it is with that phenomenon that cable companies are struggling to meet. However, understanding why convergence, and the systems and interfaces created to support it, is problematic requires a brief inspection of the historical and regulatory framework from which cable television is emerging. As service providers, cable television companies have enjoyed a successful assimilation into the mainstream of American media and technology. Originally being offered in 1948, up to 85% of American households are now subscribers (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, 2006). However, the adoption of cable required a serious lobbying effort to allow for laws and regulations that did not stifle innovation and technological investment. The passage of the 1984 Cable Act was the first major step in APA Style Sheet allowing the cable industry to create the infrastructure and capacity to service increasing amounts of households with increasing amounts of programming. In fact, from 1984 to 1992 the cable industry invested nearly $15 billion connecting American households with wiring; this represented the largest construction project by a private company since World War Two (History of Cable - NCTA, 2007). The next major regulatory change was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This bill was the first major overhaul of the FCCs original bill governing communications, the Communications Act of 1934, and represented a completely new era for all types of media, including Cable television. What the law did, for better or for worse, was to deregulate ownership rules and pricing policies of cable providers (FCC, 1996). The result has been controversial; prices for cable television have skyrocketed, however, the companies are also able to invest increasing amounts of money in advancing technology such as settop-boxes, IPTV technology, and the now pervasive move into telephony and internet service. Until recently, the major reason for cable adoption over its chief competitor of broadcast television 4 was the diversity of programming and clarity of signal (Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, 2006). This seemed a fairly compelling and obvious argument; cable offers more television programming for just a small marginal cost over broadcast. However, after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the competitors, customers, and services being provided by all types of service providers changed; the value proposition that was once as simple as being better than broadcast, was obsolete. A new era of expectations and technology was ushered in, and cable’s chief new competition, the internet and the PC, had a substantial lead time in the level of quality and depth of technological knowledge regarding consumer software and interface design. Interestingly, the internet/PC combination also had major gaps, specifically the fact that it lacked robust high quality content. The result was an unintended tradeoff; Cable had the content while the internet/PC had the tools and features for rich interaction. The result has been increasing amounts of high quality content appearing on the internet and an adoption of media servers and media PCs in the home to view it. Similarly, from other direction, Cable providers have attempted to match the quality of APA Style Sheet programming they already have with deep interaction in the form of EPG living on the consumers’ settop-box. 5 Origins and Evolution of the Set-Top-Box It is crucially important to understand the chronology of events in the cable industry to understand the impact and evolution on the set-top-box. To originally receive and decode a signal from a cable provider, consumers had to acquire a STB. The STB was named as such because it was generally placed on top of CRT television sets. This is clearly no longer an accurate nomenclature; with the advent of flat panel television sets the boxes are generally several times deeper than the set prohibiting their placement “on top”. The original STB business model was based on leasing a small black electronic box to consumers, instead of having them buy it. The thinking was twofold, first, it was more palatable to low income consumers to pay a small monthly rental fee rather than a large one time ownership fee, and second, the box didn’t really offer much marginal value to the owner. Offering the boxes for sale didn’t make much sense because the boxes had no real means for competing with one another. Originally, the box was actually just a decoder circuit used to transform the cable signal into analog form for input into the television; the importance to the customer was whether or not that one feature worked, much like a fuse box. What is important to understand is that the model of having a box receive a signal has been historically ingrained in consumers. Surprisingly, a box is no longer necessary to even receive a signal; most modern television sets include a built in analog, and even digital, tuner that can decode and display a signal. In 2003 cable providers were, in fact, forced by the FCC to move to a CableCard standard; this standard allowed for the development of “plug and play” functionality for third party STBs and televisions compatible with all cable service provider offerings. Consumers were simply required to get a CableCard, a physical board about the size of a credit card, to plug into the television or 3rd party STB to decode the encrypted signal (CNET, 2003). This ruling was supposed to represent an end to the cable APA Style Sheet provider STB business model, yet CableCards have had a very limited adoption, while STBs continue to be leased in large numbers from Cable providers. So understanding the historical context for the evolution of the STB and the FCC regulatory environment, the question persists as to why consumers are still leasing STBs directly from cable providers, and why cable providers are still controlling the software, and subsequently the UI, on those boxes. Since most major televisions support CableCard functionality it seems counterintuitive that cable providers would still be supporting and funding the creation of STB hardware and software, and that consumers would continue to tacitly support it with their patronage. While there are a myriad of more technical and business reasons for the cards failure, the most impactful come from the limitations placed on the user. Around the same time that the CableCard compatibility was legislated, Cable providers began to add major new innovative features sets. Funded, primarily, by the increase in revenues achieved after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Cable providers added “Video-On-Demand” and the EPG; both these 6 features have had widespread acceptance, and represent a monumental transformation to the way viewers are able to actively control what they are viewing. Unfortunately, neither “On-Demand” nor the EPG information is able to be “pulled” through the card and displayed on all the televisions or a third party boxes. The result is simple; viewers have opted to pay the Cable Providers for boxes that enable these features, while Cable Providers have built barriers to entry to prevent interoperability across solutions. For the time being, consumers are essentially stuck with the model at hand. The lack of consumer choice seems to have further aggravated Cable providers’ lack of interest in creating competitive UIs, preferring to focus more on enhanced technology than on enhanced usability. The lack of competition has created an environment where design and interaction models are not a risk for being improved because consumers have no real ability to vote that the usability of those characteristics is important. TV Guide and the iGuide: APA Style Sheet The Comcast EPG is a dated simplistic looking UI designed to work on the Motorola STBs Comcast 7 exclusively distributes. Motorola gives Cable providers the option of loading three different EPG systems onto the box, and Comcast has chosen the TV Guide iGuide system. This choice is likely based on the fact that iGuide is jointly developed by Comcast and Gemstar-TV Guide’s TV Guide Television Group, starting in 2004 (embeddedstar.com). Interesting to note, is that consumers do not receive this same choice, and the iGuide system is clearly the most antiquated of the group which includes Microsoft and Aptive Digital (Motorola). The iGuide system offers a number of different features including menu based navigation, the actual on screen guide, search and browse capability all of which is reflected back onto a hardware remote control. It seems intuitive that a company like Microsoft would be in this space; they create software across industries for consumers and business alike. Their success, while having its own problems, has come from a combination of better than average design, expert business strategy, and an increasing understanding of the user; it seems likely that TV Guide does not share these characteristics. TV Guide, founded in 1953, grew throughout the sixties through a series of acquisitions of smaller region television guides. Originally TV Guide served as a weekly paper based periodical that displayed broadcast television schedules for the upcoming week. The periodical was hugely successful, reaching a circulation of 20 million at its peak (Wikipedia). Their success seems almost more obvious now, as the ability to access information has become increasingly prized. TV Guide was eventually decimated by the advent of EPGs in the early 2000s and was ultimately acquired after a period of seemingly constant acquisitions by the Gemstar Corporation. The paper periodical was folded from 140 region versions to only 2, and its format was changed from a small listings based resource into more of a magazine format. At the same time TV Guide launched its iGuide service as the natural evolution from its non-interactive standalone TV Guide channel to a fully interactive EPG (Wikipedia). The implications of this historical narrative are critical. TV Guide is not a software company, nor do they have any real expertise in software design. TV Guide is one of Americas most recognized brands, however, and its previous success as a robust depository of information seemed to intuitively lend itself to the EPG format. It is, however, crucial to view the eventual EPG design through the lens of what is APA Style Sheet 8 basically a defunct magazine that has gone through multiple acquisitions now producing software largely because of brand awareness. Anatomy and Analysis of the Electronic Programming Guide In this space, the focus will be on the navigation, organization, and display of the main menu and on screen guide, as opposed to features related to technical functions and setup of the iGuide EPG. It is useful to explore these major features individually and examine the motivations, constraints, and tradeoffs that appear to have influenced the choice, both successful and not, that the designer made. While clearly not having direct access to the designers is a limitation for these conclusions, the historical backdrop does much to resolve why certain deficiencies exist. Framework & Navigation: Framework. The framework of the EPG is what appears to be a 16-Color, highly-aliased, full-screen, interactive navigation system. There is no attempt at realism, and the Spartan framework is totally abstract with little use of shading, shadowing or bevel and embossing. Abstraction has useful qualities as it decreases visual noise and typically increases contrast and readability, however, in the iGuide it seems to add little value. Combined with the high degree of pixilation the framework just looks antiquated, and provides the user with little reason to imagine the system is advanced enough to engage in complex activities. The framework would have been dated ten years ago if a similar UI existed on a PC. The menu is , APA Style Sheet however , consistent; a small view screen is minimized to the top right corner displaying the channel 9 currently being viewed while interacting with the system. Additionally, the time, Comcast and TV Guide logo, and a description bar persist through the majority of menu item screens. The default color is a light blue, which is a suitable color for the background, and there is an option for customizing the color theme, but it is limited to thirteen premade variations. The themes are also, actually just one single color change. The color options appear to be accessible, but are limited primarily to almost indistinguishably different shades of blue or are maximum hues of green, purple, and red. There are no options that utilize lighter colors with black type; all are bright colors with white type. Customization is a user demand that is satisfied in nearly all desktop software. The color combinations for the Windows desktop can be set very specifically, down to the menu bar, and furthermore the default options are more subtle and carry more information. The color options in the EPG are overly taxing on the visual system, and overuse harsh contrasts and pure hues that cause stress on the visual system. It is difficult for the eye to discern bright red bars next to bright blue frames. Similarly, font size, type, color, is essentially “as is”; this is clearly a major issue when one considers the aging population with decreased visual acuity. The current font size is not small, but nor is it large enough for older views. There is obviously a constraint for text size based on increasing the density of useful information on the screen, and making it readable; giving the user the option to move on that continuum is likely a more effective solution to simply setting one default. The description bar however is somewhat skillfully designed. It appears in a consistent location, avoids useless or overly wordy text, and uses color to preattentively premier the program title. Title, Time, New versus Repeat, and other relevant information such as year made and major actors are all displayed first on the top line of the description. This seems intuitive, but it is just as easy to bury the information at the end of the description; users are likely more concerned with issues about APA Style Sheet timing and relevance than a full description, and this method makes good use of efficient design principles. However, the information in the bar suffers from the same readability versus information density problem as seen throughout. 10 The iGuide framework is clearly out of date, both to comparable internet and PC UIs as well as EPGs produced for other Cable service providers by other companies. There is a total lack of aesthetic design, mobile phone applications look richer, and nearly no ability to customize the look and feel for preference or need. Users are largely confined to using the choices in design that have been made for them. The reason behind the seemingly unexplained lack of aesthetics or user input is likely explained by who the iGuide designers’ employers are. Clearly, the focus in the framework is on the capability, and not the usability of the system. It’s likely that TV Guide has little experience with User Centered Design, and made a somewhat understandable, though not acceptable, choice as a first time developer to let the capabilities of the system drive the design. As a result, aesthetic minimalism is ignored, for Spartan design reflecting a lack of interest rather than a concerted attempt to minimize clutter. Color and font choice is uninformed, again reflecting a total lack of understanding the limitations of the visual system. Business decision drove the design decisions exhibited in the foundation of the iGuide, and while this pitfall has come to be expected; here it becomes a conscious tradeoff between product usability and product capability. Navigation. Similar design decisions appear to have been made when it came to designing the navigation model throughout the iGuide. Users familiar with the WIMP model or the tabbed browsing model for the internet are likely to be confounded by model in iGuide. Links, or the information they represent, offer no real hierarchy of importance; The “Local Weather” is given equal standing with Search and the On Screen Guide. The result is that the users get little help in determining significance, and are often reduced to exploration rather than conscious directed decision making. APA Style Sheet The navigational choices are reinforced by the treatment applied to buttons. Links, or buttons, are represented as long, similar symmetrical shapes that are activated by cycling through with the remote control and activating with the “OK / Select” button. The buttons display selection state using a color change, and once activated the selection title is reflected in the description bar. There are roughly 2 “pages” of buttons presented in the Main Menu, and they are reached by using either the page down button on the remote or by cycling through individually. Upon exploration the user is faced with a daunting navigation path with little done to meet or drive 11 expectations. Similar to an internet browser, the user is given limited options; they can go back or choice a link to go forward. While the underlying model is acceptable, the design around it is not. Users have little context throughout the navigation action. iGuide does make use of monochromatic icons to indicate different features, and these icons are legible and fairly illustrative of the function or interaction. Other than icons, however, the lack of landmarks makes it exceptionally difficult to derive what the designer’s conceptual model was for the system. In fact, a user’s mental model for the organizational schema is likely non-existent; context is so a lacking that a user likely processes only one screen at a time, unable to string together a larger pattern of organization. Again, the reason for this archaic navigation appears to be driven by business goals, namely having a more robust set of features on paper, than actually working to make the entire experience enjoyable, cohesive or useful. It looks like features were created separately, and then simply bolted onto the main menu. Clearly, the designers made choices without having any sort of information architecture; some APA Style Sheet features require as much as six screens to get to the target, and while typing is certainly a more time 12 consuming task, the current organization seems excessive. The only context is conveyed through the title in the description bar, there is no use of color, picture, or design used to reinforce to the user that they have entered a specific section. XBOX 360 has done a masterful job in this regard; faced with the same problem of lacking keyboard entry, they created a very skillful organizational structure reinforced with colored backgrounds and pictures, and limited choices. On-Screen Guide / Listings: In addition to the Main Menu’s navigation and structure, the specific feature of the On Screen Guide is by far the most used, and likely the most defining characteristic of the EPG. The On Screen Guide also is the most direct tie from the EPG interface to the real world, and is especially relevant given TV Guide’s past expertise and success on displaying programming information. The guide itself exists within the description of the framework above, and is available in two main varieties: “Quick Guide” and the more extensive full screen version entitled “TV Listings”. The design of both iterations is fairly straightforward, and mimics the block by block, left to right, linear, time-channel matrix that has existed since TV Guide’s inception. The quick version gives users a three or two channel bar snapshot of the next 90minutes, while the full screen version expands to offer four with inline descriptions. Channel abbreviation and number are located on the left, and the programming is coded by changing the bar color; sports are green, movies purple, children’s shows light blue, and normal programming a default color. APA Style Sheet As information design goes, a matrix is always an effective means of delivering complex data, but 13 this iteration suffers from the same aesthetic issues as the framework. In terms of interaction, the timeline only shows the future, not the past. While seeing the past may strike some as having little use, it actually does much in helping users interact with programming. Knowing that some program has been missed, confirms the user’s need to have complete control over the information and matches the real world experience of the old TV Guides. The reason the iGuide lacks this feature is likely twofold, it’s not an intuitive feature to build, and it increases the amount of information needed to be stored on the STB. Both reasons largely ignore how users will expect the product to behave in the real world. iGuide does, however, do a reasonable job with that forward looking information, storing 14 days worth. This amount of data seems to be sufficient for the average user, as television series and their related marketing rarely seeks to influence viewership to watch specific programs for periods of longer than one week. Much like the framework, the On Screen Guide lacks customization as well. In a world of 900 channels the guide lacks the ability to easily filter content. Instead, users must act as a human filter, knowing the channels they do or do not subscribe to or exploring by trial and error, a tedious process in its own right. Similarly, users are not able to easily visually organize channels that are favorites; they can mark them as such, but cannot create a limited set of channels to easily display and browse. The list has to be accessed through a number of steps, and cannot be used while watching another program. Instead, the user is again relied upon to act as a filter. The user is also faced with a limiting experience when exploring the specific details of an individual program. Action options are displayed with little thought to importance or frequency of use, APA Style Sheet 14 and some buttons appear to do the same action. Additionally, users likely do not want to have to look at this information every time they open a description; acting on a program and reading a description are two separate actions. Ultimately, it seems as though the designers simply took the paper guide and put it into an electronic form. There is little overall value or innovation past the initial paper design, except for the fact, not to be downplayed from a business perspective, that a user can get basic information with little effort in one place. What the guide lacks is true interaction; it can be manipulated to see into the future or to select a program to watch, but a user can’t act on the vast quantities of information within it. A user cannot set a filter to remind them when a particular actor or director is on, nor can users get any additional information from other resources not contained in the guide. It seems as though all design considerations were being made based on the previous paper version, which was successful because of the inherent un-interactive qualities of the physical medium. Once the information moves to a software platform, users expect more; they expect to be able to manipulate the data in ways they find productive, and expect to have to work less hard over time. Instead, it seems obvious that the designers were more concerned with digitizing the original format for the sake of attaching a well known brand, than with truly developing the guide with new more robust model of interaction. Conclusion It is clear that the historical brand awareness of TV Guide, and the business decision to leverage that single variable into a piece of software was the driving force in the design decision making process. Aside from the regurgitation of the ubiquitous time/channel matrix, the rest of the software offers little in the way of conceptual models. Instead, Comcast is able to influence poor unilateral decisions because the eventual iGuide product exists in a competitive vacuum. Without an open market for competition, where users and viewers have the choice to demand a more usable and robust product, it is not likely that the Comcast iGuide partnership will acquiesce. It will likely take the radical innovation of IPTV, essentially getting television content onto the PC through internet protocols, to deliver the level and depth of features APA Style Sheet that create a positive user experience that customers demand. 15 APA Style Sheet 16 References Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. (2006). Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau - 2006 TV Facts: Cable Programming Reaches 85% of All Television Households. Retrieved November 20, 2007, from Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau: http://www.onetvworld.org/?module=displaystory&story_id=1480&format=html Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. (2006). Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau - Proprietary Studies "How People Use Television" Study. Retrieved November 20, 2007, from Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau: http://www.onetvworld.org/?module=displaystory&story_id=968&format=html CNET. (2003, September 10). FCC adopts 'plug and play' cable for TVs - CNET News.com. Retrieved November 11, 2007, from CNET: http://www.news.com/FCC-adopts-plug-and-play-cable-for-TVs/21001041_3-5074425.html embeddedstar.com. (n.d.). Gemstar-TV Guide, Concurrent Showcase Video-On-Demand Technology. Retrieved 12 1, 2007, from embeddedstar.com: http://www.embeddedstar.com/press/content/2004/5/embedded14395.html FCC. (1996). Telecommunications Act of 1996. Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. LA. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56 (1996) . Fowler, D. (2006). It’s Called Convergence, Baby. Net News March , 5-9. History of Cable - NCTA. (2007). Retrieved November 20, 2007, from National Cable Television Association: http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?contentId=2685&nada=nothing Motorola. (n.d.). Motorola DVR: DCT6412 Multimedia Demo. Retrieved 12 01, 2007, from Motorola.com: http://broadband.motorola.com/dvr/dct6412_multimedia_demo.asp Wikipedia. (n.d.). TV Guide - Wikipedia. Retrieved 12 01, 2007, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tv_Guide