The Interactive Lounge
The UK's first fully comprehensive multi-media testing lab with eye tracking
Increasingly consumers access information simultaneously across multiple platforms and devices. Services, like youTube and iPlayer, are developed specifically as ‘multi-platform' services capable of working on devices including TV, mobile and computer.
Unless we make them easy to use, these clever new services do not succeed. That's why we have created the Interactive Lounge. To give you a 360 degree picture of the multi-media user experience.
The Interactive Lounge: The Benefits
This is the only lab in the UK where you can test interactive TV, remote control activity, mobile and the internet at the same time, in the same room, as a single user experience.
The lab offers broadcasters, set top box manufacturers, advertisers and content producers a unique insight into the usability of a new service.
Being able to switch between different stimuli such as a TV, mobile phone and computer, in one session means we can capture every move as well as the emotion and psychology of the user's experience in the lab.
Moreover, clients and developers observing user experience test sessions can view how each participant is using the different platforms, capturing information first hand on issues and complexities as they arise and even seeing where their eyes are looking and their fingers pointing, as they interact.
The lab brings together a unique combination of technologies to ensure that multi-platform services are tested effectively. This allows content producers to simulate their services prior to launch, reducing costly changes to deployed services.
What is The Interactive Lounge?
The specially constructed lab in our Edinburgh headquarters has been designed to simulate a comfortable home environment. This means the user is relaxed and more engaged, not influenced by the feeling of being under ‘test' conditions.
A large screen shows client observers views of the TV screen and remote control, the user's face and eye tracking movement. Observers watch how the user navigates through options, reacts to advertisements, how the remote control is used and how well they understand the process.
The lounge is comfy yet technically innovative, allowing us to capture a complete 360 degree picture of multi-media user experience, enhanced with specialist technologies such as eye tracking. Recording and observing the user's journey will cover interactive TV, mobile, games and the internet.
We have developed the lounge in partnership with iTV technology specialist, Jonathan Marshall, who has pioneered research and innovation in iTV for over ten years.
The Interactive Lounge has already been used to test the PoGo service, developed for the BBC by User Vision and Slipstream which allows users to browse record, rate, recommend and share programme content from any source and to access that content from any device anywhere.
The Interactive Lounge was launched at IBC2008 in Amsterdam
What to do next
To find out how The Interactive Lounge can benefit your organisation and to receive a no obligation quotation then please contact us .
