TV Meets the Web
In my review of WebTV's usability, I concluded that they had great
design, especially regarding novice user usability, but that the design
constraints relating to using a small screen and cursor keys on a remote
control were too severe for an optimal Web-browsing experience. Well,
maybe Web-access through television sets doesn't need to be as usable
as a normal computer if it can provide other benefits.
Experience with traditional media has shown that even media that are
quite similar can have different properties and different things they
are good at. Consider television, movies, and theatre: all three basically
show human actors in costumes who read scripts in front of stage sets.
All are very different from comic books, novels, conference panels,
or a list of the first million digits of pi. Even so, the focus of the
three media is different:
- Television is about characters. TV is shown on a small
screen that presents faces and close-ups better than landscapes. Because
viewers sit in their living rooms with many distractions, shows tend
to be at most one hour long, meaning that they cannot evolve complex
plots. Series of TV shows are common because the audience likes the
convenience of tuning in every week at the same time and because they
can easily do so since the TV set is in their house and has no usage
fees. Seeing the same characters week after week leads to extensive
character development during a season.
- Movies are about stories. Viewers have gone to the
trouble of driving to the movie theatre, so they want more than a
half-hour show, though most films are still less than two hours long
due to human biology. Because viewers are trapped in a dark room for
the duration of the film, the storyline can be developed further than
is possible on TV. On the other hand, because of the expense and bother
of going to the movies, people rarely do so on a regular basis, meaning
that continued series are rare (except for one or two sequels to popular
films). Because of the lack of series, characters are developed less
and the film rests more on a strong plot.
- Theatre is about ideas. The audience sits far away
from the stage and cannot see the actors as well as on film. Nor can
the stage show as elaborate sets or landscapes. These differences
lead to prominence of dialogue over visuals. Also, the added expense
of live actors for every performance makes the tickets significantly
more expensive than movie tickets and attracts a more elite and intellectual
audience. At the same time, the start-up cost of putting on the performance
is less than the cost of producing a film, meaning that theatre is
more suited for experimental expressions.
Furthermore, of course, television has a substantial news and non-fiction
component that is not present in movies and theatre due to the ability
of TV to deliver content in real time.
It is clear that Web access from television sets is a different style
of medium than Web access from a computer screen. This difference is
OK and will only serve to strengthen the Web. As an analogy, it doesn't
hurt the paper medium that newspapers and books are different.
The Web on computers is a very information-rich medium that is based
on a high degree of user initiative and engagement: users create their
own experience through a steady stream of hypertext-following clicks.
Clearly, WebTV is ill suited to support this kind of user experience.
The Web on television should still be more user-driven and individualized
than the fully passive mass medium of broadcast TV, but it needs to
move in directions better suited to the device. This is not to say that
WebTV users can not benefit from accessing some parts of the traditional
Web: after all, successful films have been made based on Shakespeare's
plays and television networks often broadcast feature films. But as
pointed out above, the mainstream directions of the media have turned
out to be separate.
The most obvious direction for the Web on television is integration
with broadcast TV. Online TV program listings are one example of content
that would seem optimal for WebTV users. It would also be quite useful
to have hyperlinks to detailed information about each show: which actor
is playing this role? what are the statistics for this baseball player?
The point being that the system should know what program the user was
watching and have appropriate links for that specific show so that the
basic user experience would be driven by the television and not by fully
flexible browsing.
The figure shows one of the ideas we developed in SunSoft's Worlds
Without Windows project as a user interface for hyperlinks from a TV
show to the Web: The anchor of a television show ("Jane") tells the
viewers that there is more information about some story at their website.
She makes a throwing gesture that is detected by a gesture recognizer
which animates the appearance of a hypertext reference flying out of
her hand and morphing into a miniature of the Web page in question.
If the user wants to read the page, he or she makes a gesture to activate
the Web link. In our project, we assumed the use of a large screen where
the Web info would grow into a separate area, but one could use the
same idea with a revised version of WebTV and switch a small monitor
between broadcast and Web reading as needed. The right part of the figure
shows one of our other ideas: a chat room tied into the TV to allow
the user to discuss the show with his or her friends.
When more bandwidth becomes available, it will also be possible to
use a television-based Web to assemble more efficient evening news broadcasts
optimized for the individual viewer. For example, the show could start
by having the anchorperson read the list of the day's headlines. Each
family could then indicate what stories they wanted to see - either
by having a single person click a button as interesting headlines are
read or by letting each family member have his or her own button. This
latter solution is more family-friendly: the current WebTV design with
a single remote control is divorce lawyers' delight.
Note how my example of selecting stories for a customized evening
news show relies on a fairly passive user interface: click a button
as a fixed set of choices are read. In general, I think that the amount
of initiative and activity required of the user will be the major defining
difference between TV-based Web and computer-based Web. I don't think
that the use of video will be as important a difference since I expect
computer-based Web to include more multimedia effects as bandwidth grows
and more powerful computers (allowing better compression as well as
a cache of at least a terabyte on your local harddisk) become popular.